


One to Speak, Another to Hear

by seventymilestobabylon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Original Character(s), Post-War, Slow Burn, Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-07-03 02:50:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 60,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15809817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventymilestobabylon/pseuds/seventymilestobabylon
Summary: The Wizarding Wars are over, but the work of recovery has only begun. Remus Lupin is trying to find his place in an ever-changing world, and when he is invited to serve on a truth and reconciliation commission, he has to confront the truth that lives there—in the past and within himself.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> JK Rowling has said that she originally intended to kill Arthur Weasley in _Order of the Phoenix,_ but when push came to shove she couldn’t do it, and she killed Sirius Black instead. [(source)](https://www.today.com/popculture/rowling-i-wanted-kill-parents-2D80555846) She’s also said that because she gave Arthur Weasley that reprieve in the fifth book, she went ahead and killed Tonks and Lupin instead. [(source)](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/05/harry-potter-jk-rowling-apologizes-killing-remus-lupin-sirius-black-gay) For this story, I’ve just reversed that decision and let Arthur Weasley die in Book Five, in exchange for keeping Tonks, Sirius, and Lupin. SORRY ARTHUR SORRY MOLLY.
> 
> I’ve also done away with Tonks and Lupin’s relationship because tbqh I think it’s bullshit that the two most heavily queer-coded characters in the book apart from Dumbledore got conveniently paired up in heterosexual bliss. Also, I wanted Remus and Sirius to kiss since they are plainly in love. Also, I wanted Tonks to have a relationship with someone not emotionally stunted. Everywhere else, I’ve stuck with canon.
> 
> Huge huge thanks to [justira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justira/pseuds/justira) for the thoughtful, brilliant beta.

**Excerpted from “Proposed Commission of Inquiry into the Wizarding Wars, 1978–1998”**

__

The selection panel may consist of one member of each of the following groups, to be chosen by each group’s governing body: The staff of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; Survivors’ Support Services; the staff of St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries; Associated Society of Wizarding Retail Merchants; the Ministry of Magic (may send up to three representatives); the Order of the Phoenix; Tom Riddle’s Death Eaters; and Slytherins for Justice. Centaur, goblin, house-elf, and mermaid groups will also be solicited to send up to four representatives. The Muggle Prime Minister may join the selection panel, or send a representative of his choosing. Any group may elect not to send a representative to participate in the selection process, accepting that refusal to participate will not exempt their group from scrutiny under the formal inquiry process. 

__

__

Nominees for commissioners will be accepted until 31 December 1999. Any member of the wizarding public, including magic-born Muggles, may submit nominations for consideration by the selection panel. Interviews will be conducted with any nominee supported by at least four members of the selection panel; such interviews will be freely open to the public and will be recorded and archived for free viewing at all major wizarding libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Five commissioners will be selected by 30 March 2000. Unanimous accord among the selection panel will be required to seat any commissioner.

* * *

Remus read the letter twice, and it still didn’t make any sense. He wondered if there had been a mistake, except that his name was at the top of it, Remus John Lupin. “Pads,” he said.

“Mm.” Sirius didn’t look up from what he was doing, which was whittling the leg of a broken chair down to a nub.

“Give this to him,” said Remus to the owl. If birds could have rolled their eyes, this one would have. It hopped across the room, tossing filthy glares back at Remus, and dropped the Ministry’s letter pointedly in the middle of Sirius’s pile of wood shavings.

Sirius put down the knife, shook the Ministry letter open, and read it through. “Bloody hell.”

“Do you think I should go?”

Sirius was reading the letter for a second time, and his eyes moved so fast that Remus felt forcefully twenty-five years younger, the way it had been at school, when he was always several beats behind Sirius.

_“Tosh,” said James—he was always saying ridiculous, old-man things that he’d picked up from his parents. “You could catch up to anything Sirius does any time you wanted to.”_

_“If I could, why wouldn’t I?” Remus snapped back, nettled._

_James looked smug. “Because you_ don’t _want to.”_

What did James know.

“Go if you like,” said Sirius, tossing the letter carelessly away. His carelessness was familiar, but it seemed to cost Sirius more than it had before his years in Azkaban—it pinched him at the edges, like a too-small suit he was determined to make the best of.

“I could use a bit more help than that.” Remus got up and walked the four steps over to where Sirius had resumed his whittling. “What’s that meant to be, anyway?”

Sirius held the whittled chair leg at arm’s length and regarded it accusingly. “Doesn’t look like much, does it?” Remus couldn’t help smiling at him, and Sirius almost smiled back. Then he said, “They’ll piss you about and send you home all mopey, and I’ll have to nurse you back to good cheer.”

It irritated Remus no end, the way Sirius sometimes spoke about him as if he were a child or a beloved-but-fiddly possession, or—

That “or” was everything. If he let himself think the sentence all the way to its ending, he would not be irritated but desperate and hungry, bloody fucking ravenous, for Sirius to mean it that way, want him that way. The way Sirius had never—barring the one time long ago that they never talked about and never, evidently, would—given any indication of wanting him.

“I’m not your pet dog,” Remus said.

Sirius glanced up, at the tone. Whatever he saw in Remus’s face must have satisfied him, because he went back to his whittling. “If either of us was going to be the other one’s pet dog,” he said, placidly and intolerably. “Look, Moony, go out for it if you want to, but I think it’ll be horrible.”

“They won’t take me, anyway.”

“Course they’ll take you,” said Sirius. “What’s it say? High moral character—that’s you—practical experience of the conflict, that’s you as well, minimal personal losses—well, good luck with that one, innit?”

Remus hated it when Sirius affected unposhness. He himself had spent hours listening to the BBC and learning quite a bit about political conflicts in Central America and trying to eradicate every trace of his childhood accent, so that he would sound more like Sirius and James.

“At least fifteen at the close of the first war,” said Sirius, who evidently had the letter by heart after two reads, “no worries about that, you grizzled old man, no criminal convictions under lawful wizarding governments, no history of violation of human rights, well, unless you’ve been keeping a dark past from me all these years—”

“I’m a werewolf,” Remus said, more viciously perhaps than he felt, because he wanted Sirius to stop talking in that casual, fond way. As if it could make sense to have him, Remus Lupin, werewolf, sitting in high judgment like a member of the Wizengamot, deciding who had done right and who had done evil. “They’ll want—I dunno, Dumbledore—”

“Dead,” Sirius pointed out.

“—don’t be a shit, people _like_ Dumbledore, proper people, not—”

“It’s up to them what they want,” said Sirius. “Not you. You’ll only be going in to talk with them, and if they don’t want a werewolf, they won’t, whatsitcalled, sit you, choose you. It’ll only be an afternoon.”

“Weren’t you trying to tell me not to go, just now?”

Sirius shrugged. “I don’t mind either way. You said to help more! I’m only thinking through the different bits. It would be bloody awful and you’d be good at it, so I expect you’ll go in the end.”

“Would I?” said Remus. “Be good at it?”

In the act of leaning down for his knife, Sirius twisted his neck up to peer at Remus’s face. He did this sometimes, a sudden intense stare, always with a touch of surprise in his eyes, and he always seemed relieved, after. “You know you would be. Don’t fish.”

Remus didn’t know he would be. Not as though he’d been particularly good at anything he’d tried, to date—but that was a bad road to send his thoughts down. When he owled back “yes” and the times he was available to come in and speak with the selection panel, it wasn’t because he thought he’d be good at it, or even because it was the right thing to do, although he knew that it was. Shamingly, it was that he needed the money.

That wasn’t true. He _wanted_ the money. He’d spent most of his adult life dirt-poor or living on other people’s generosity—the money James and Lily had left to him, and then Sirius’s and Harry’s money. Nobody in the wizarding world was willing to hire a werewolf, even now. Especially now. And the Muggle world required experience and identification that he didn’t have, and Sirius acted like it didn’t matter in the slightest if Remus lived in his house and ate his food forever.

Stand on your own two feet, Remus Lupin, he thought, and he sent off the owl.

* * *

The selection panel was meeting in one of the lower floors at the Ministry. Remus hadn’t been down there since after the first war. Since Sirius’s sentencing.

He didn’t want to think about it.

Kingsley was there, waiting for him, leaning up against the chilly stone wall that made all the lower levels of the Ministry look like a dungeon. Typical of Kingsley, to try and put him at his ease. Remus offered a hand, and Kingsley smiled a little and shook it. So far it hadn’t stopped being strange to see Kingsley—who so recently had been risking his life alongside Remus and the rest of them—as the Minister of Magic. The position sat easily on him, though the rebellion never had.

“You don’t need to worry,” said Kingsley.

“No, no, of course not,” Remus said hastily. “I’m not worried.”

Kingsley nodded as if he believed it, and opened the door to let Remus in.

Nothing was ever as bad as you expected. When Sirius was sentenced, God, don’t think about it, the courtroom had been full of judges and witnesses and onlookers, and Remus couldn’t catch Sirius’s eye in all the crowd. Now it was nearly empty, with only a handful of people, fewer than twenty, seated in a jagged semicircle at the front. Remus wondered idly how they’d gotten the goblins to agree to send somebody. The goblins had no opinion of wizardkind, less than ever since Voldemort.

“Remus John Lupin,” said Kingsley, behind him, and a large wizard with red hair began taking down notes.

Remus waved at the panel and immediately hated himself for waving. He said, “Hello,” and wished he hadn’t done that, either. He said, “I thought—I’m so sorry, but I thought these meetings were public?”

“Yes,” said—hell, said Minerva McGonagall, Remus hadn’t even seen her there, Merlin, he was losing his mind. “There hasn’t been a great deal of interest.”

“I see.” Remus sat where Kingsley indicated, in a wooden office chair that put him just a hair lower than the seats of the people on the selection panel. It was oddly demoralizing, but he supposed it would have been worse to sit higher. He tried to remember where Sirius, he tried not to think about where Sirius had sat, to be sent to Azkaban.

Amos Diggory leaned forward in his seat. “Mr. Lupin, do you have a clear sense of the remit of the proposed commission of inquiry?”

“A little,” said Remus. “I know what’s been published in the _Prophet,_ not much more.”

Kingsley’s face changed. If Remus hadn’t known him, he might not have recognized that Kingsley was, quietly, pleased. There was a small battle here, and that answer had won it for Kingsley. Remus was glad, but he hated not being certain of what he was standing in the middle of.

“Is that true?” Amos Diggory asked.

Remus did not feel that he needed to justify himself to Amos Diggory. Amos Diggory had stood outside Eeylops Owl Emporium with another bereaved parent a few months after the Battle of Hogwarts and screamed profanities—it was Slytherin-owned—at anyone who went in. _Death Eater traitors_ was the nicest thing he’d said. He hadn’t been quite right since Cedric died, though nobody could deny that the victims group he founded with Molly Weasley had worked wonders for wizards who had lost everything under Voldemort.

“Is what true?” Remus said.

“Quite all right for you not to know,” said Minerva tactfully. “In brief, we are assembling a group of five commissioners who will take testimony, thoroughly and from all sides, on the recent wars with Voldemort.”

Recent. His whole life had been those wars, back to the bite that had turned him into a monster, and she said “recent.” Remus regulated his face, not to show his annoyance. He was good at doing that.

“The commission will take in as much information as it is able, and at the end it will issue a report. A clarification of facts. This will stand as a record—it is our hope,” Minerva corrected herself, “that this will stand as an impartial record of the events, the deaths and abuses perpetrated in our recent history.”

“Not so recent,” Remus said, because he couldn’t pass it a second time.

Minerva’s eyes closed for a moment. “No,” she said. “No. It wasn’t much of a world we passed down to you, was it?”

The goblin, whom Remus didn’t know, said, “He’s supposed to be the non-human representative, is he?”

Kingsley’s head came up sharply. “Like everyone we’ve spoken to, he’s under consideration simply to be a representative. We’ve requested that every kind of being make nominations for the committee, and as you recall, Bodrig—”

“Leave it out,” said the goblin, Bodrig. Remus had heard his name before, he thought, although he couldn’t place it. Perhaps he had come onto Fred and George’s radio show, during the war. “I’ve got the point, no need to lecture.”

Remus hid a smile behind his hand. He thought that if they did choose him (they wouldn’t), he would have to remember to advocate for non-humans. He wasn’t non-human but he was halfway there.

They asked about his parents. About the first Order of the Phoenix, his role in it. About James and Lily’s deaths, where he had been when that happened. “I was in Scotland,” he said. He made himself keep his hands still. “Albus Dumbledore sent me there, to meet with the werewolf enclave outside of Glasgow—the MacRinnalchs, primarily, if you’re familiar with them.”

“A long way to go,” said a judge he didn’t know, a woman with a pointed nose and keen gray eyes.

They weren’t judges. They were panel members.

“Yes,” said Remus. “I was a member of the Order of the Phoenix, and it was thought—at the time, they had realized there was a spy. Afterward I realized that Albus and—and others believed that it might be me, and I think it was something of a test. A test, and to get me out of the way.”

Tell the truth, he had told himself, that morning, before coming here. Then everything would be up to them: their own decisions, for better or worse. He would not have deceived them into imagining a version of his life that was sanitized and virtuous. And they wouldn’t choose him, and it would not be because he had refused to do his duty when called to it.

Minerva was watching him with that uncomfortably keen gaze she had evidently learned from—or taught to, for all Remus knew—Dumbledore. “Were you a spy for Voldemort?” she asked.

“No.”

“When did the Order of the Phoenix realize that?”

Remus looked up at her. If he met her eyes he was avoiding no one’s, and she already knew the answer. “When James and Lily died. When I came back for the funeral.”

He went to the funeral alone. It had been an offensively sunny day, when they put James and Lily’s bodies in the ground. Remus kept turning to look for Sirius, and then remembering.

The panel asked him about his work for the Order in the second war, and he told them what he could remember. All the truth, the bad missions as well as the good. As far as he knew, he’d never killed anyone. Dumbledore always had one eye on the strengths and weaknesses of his people, and he’d never asked Remus to kill for him. Remus had never had to find out if he would be able to do it.

The goblin, Bodrig, asked him why he hadn’t collaborated, as so many wizards had, to ensure their own safety, and that of their families.

“I don’t think,” began Kingsley.

“I’d like to hear the answer,” said Amos Diggory.

“My parents are dead,” said Remus. That was the simplest response. “I haven’t got a family to protect.”

“They died when?” Bodrig asked.

Remus nodded. Yes: It was an incomplete answer. In the first war, his parents had been alive, and he had fought anyway. “My father was killed in the first war. It didn’t have anything to do with—as far as I could tell, it didn’t have anything to do with my work for the Order. My mother died three years after Voldemort’s death—his, I should say, his disappearance.”

“So. What else.”

What else. “My friends were all involved in the fight, and I suppose that was part of it. And, well—” Even now, it was hard to say. Hard to find the words. “I’m a werewolf. When it came down to it, there was a level of neutrality that—was available to some witches and wizards, and not to me.”

“You’re saying that you were too persecuted already to persecute others?” said Amos Diggory. His voice was not combative. He really wanted to know.

“No,” said Remus. “I mean that the choice to collaborate or to resist involved a more complicated calculus in the case of witches and wizards for whom invisibility was—theoretically—possible. A man known to be a werewolf can’t keep his head down in that way. If I had wanted to collaborate, but not to be used as a weapon, the people with whom I’d have done it wouldn’t have been interested in my candidacy, if you see what I mean.”

It was the kind of answer that made Sirius call him cold-blooded. Bodrig liked it, and Amos Diggory didn’t, and Remus was glad of both.

* * *

The owl came with his results a week later. Unanimously, they had voted him into the commission. He stared at the paper a long time, trying to parse the words there. The amount they proposed to pay him for every week of work.

Merlin, the money. For Sirius’s last birthday, he’d cast a spell to make Muggles think he was playing the violin beautifully in the Underground, and he’d managed to scrabble together enough Muggle money off of that to get a leather jacket at an Oxfam, which was a kind of Muggle junk store.

“It’s brilliant,” said Sirius, when Remus gave it to him. His smile, just then, was exactly the way Remus remembered it.

But this, this, with the salary they were offering, he could be a real person, who bought proper groceries and robes at Madame Malkin’s and more than one drink at the Leaky Cauldron. (Who did not depend on an old school friend for everything.) Maybe afterward, when it was finished, he would be known, trusted enough that he could get a real job, something permanent at the Ministry. 

His eyes kept returning, incredulous, to the word _unanimous._ He came up with the translation _they want you,_ which was everything he knew was wrong about him as a person. Not _they want you,_ he told himself, sternly. It isn’t that.

When he was eleven, a boy with dark hair and an unattainable accent flopped onto Remus’s bed in the Gryffindor dormitory and said, “I never thought I’d be good enough for this house.”

Shocked into truthfulness, Remus said, “I never thought I’d be good enough for this school,” and Sirius Black opened brown eyes and grinned up at him. Nearly thirty years on, Remus had not yet recovered from his flattered astonishment at being trusted like that, by a stranger, by someone like Sirius Black.

That was the core of them: For James and even for Peter, they put on their best faces. To each other they told the truth, until they didn’t.

 _Unanimous_ didn’t mean _wanted,_ and it didn’t come close to meaning _accepted._

If he sat staring at the letter for much longer, he was going to be late for lunch. He stuffed it between the seat cushion and the armrest of the wingback armchair and disapparated in the unshowy, absent-minded way that drove Sirius into frenzies of annoyance when he witnessed it.

* * *

Remus had a standing lunch every Monday with Tonks, no matter what else was happening in their lives. They were the only queer wizards either of them knew, “except for Sirius maybe,” Remus used to add, until Tonks told him either to shove Sirius into a Grimmauld Place bedroom to snog him, or shut up whining about it.

“They’ve asked me to sit on the truth commission for the wizarding wars,” said Remus, after they’d gotten their salads and Tonks had cast that spell of hers—he kept forgetting to ask about it—that made their conversation impossible for Muggles to overhear.

“I’m seeing a Muggle,” Tonks announced, and slumped forward onto the table, her head buried in her arms.

Remus stared at her. “You—but. Why?”

“Mm mphk er,” said Tonks into her arms.

“But,” said Remus, stupidly.

Tonks lifted her head, peering out at Remus through a cage of her fingers. “Well I do.”

“But if you like her,” said Remus, even though he knew there was no point his saying this because Tonks would already have thought of this because it was the only thing there was to think about, “you know, wouldn’t it be better to be, sort of, friends?”

“You always think it would be better to be sort of friends,” said Tonks waspishly.

“You’ll have to lie to her, all the time.”

“Oh, I told her,” said Tonks.

Remus could feel his eyes getting wide. Sometimes he wondered how a person as law-abiding as he was had ended up with so many friends who blithely did whatever they wanted and hoped for the best.

“She told me to stop playing silly buggers.”

“Well, it does sound silly, doesn’t it?”

“And then I told her I knew her mum had died last year and it hadn’t happened the way she thought.”

Remus laughed, because there wasn’t anything else to do. He knew what his expression must be, the prefect face that Sirius still, occasionally, teased him for. “No. No. You’re going to have to start again. You are going on dates with and telling enormous secrets to—”

“And shagging the brains out of—”

“And shagging the brains out of a Muggle you’d previously encountered in a professional capacity, and in whose, let’s face it, brain damage you were complicit?”

Tonks made herself look like a caricature of a stern-faced Remus for a flash of a second, then went back to normal. “Brain damage,” she said, doing inverted commas with her fingers. “ _I_ didn’t Obliviate her. You’re making it sound worse than it is.”

“Did you shag her before or after you told her that her mum hadn’t really died in a gas explosion?”

“Both,” said Tonks.

Remus pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Oh, don’t look like that. She wouldn’t have shagged me afterwards if she’d been furious about it, would she?”

“No, of course not,” said Remus, dryly. “Angry people never have sex.”

“Like you’d know,” muttered Tonks.

(She thought Remus lived like a monk, and Remus didn’t correct her.)

“Anyway.” Tonks popped a cherry tomato into her mouth and bit down on it decidedly. “She wasn’t. She thanked me for telling her the truth. She saw I hadn’t set out to lie to her, you know, just the one initial lie that I’ve got to do by law, and then after that being completely truthful—”

Remus cocked an eyebrow.

“Well, all right, I left out quite a lot when I told her about myself, but I didn’t tell her any other actual lies. I said I worked for the government and I didn’t want to get into it because being with her was a lovely respite—”

“Respite,” Remus repeated.

“You’re not the only brainy one.”

Remus laughed. He liked Tonks. If things had been different, they always said, they’d have gotten married and made charming, nearly pureblood, wizard babies together. “Well,” he said. “Well. Tell me about her, then.”

Tonks’s eyes filled up with tears, and Remus thought: _Oh._ Wetly, she said, “You’ve got—no, but I’ve been going on and on. Tell me about your thing, the, the commission. What’s all that about, what’s it for?”

“Well, I—” Remus reached across the table and squeezed Tonks’s hand. “Never mind that, look, tell me about the girl. I want to hear.”

“She’s really really lovely,” Tonks said, and sputtered out a damp laugh. “Look, I’m a bloody mess just— Her name’s Hannah. She’s like, she’s a bit like a nice, pretty, funny, clever, not-horrible Madam Pince. I mean if Madam Pince were absolutely perfect and then lost all her standards and went on a date with me, that’s, that would be like Hannah, a bit.”

“Hannah’s a pretty name,” said Remus, which was the only sensible thing he could think of to say in response.

“I know!” Tonks slumped forward again. When she came back up, she’d redone her face, to show him. Hannah was pretty—she looked to be in her early thirties, and she had green eyes and a small mouth, and sticks poked through a bun at the back of her head. “Like that,” said Tonks, putting her face back to normal.

“She looks nice.”

“She’s _so_ nice, she’s completely lovely, and she’s _brilliant,_ I mean _utterly_ Ravenclaw, and she’s, I dunno, it’s like I’ve never—I mean, Dad’s family are Muggles, aren’t they? I’m not stupid about them the way—” Tonks cut herself off and blinked up at Remus.

“You’re not at all stupid!” said Remus. (Tonks joked about being clever the same way Remus joked about being human.) “Certainly not about Muggles.”

“But she’s—she’s, it’s like I’ve never spoken to a Muggle before. Being with her. She makes everything sound new and brilliant. I. Just.” Tonks looked like she was going to slump forward again. “Stop laughing!”

“I’m not laughing.” Laughing was the furthest thing, really. “I haven’t seen you this way about anyone before.”

Tonks smiled at him. It was strange—he wouldn’t have said that she was affected by the war in the same way, for instance, Harry was, but now that she was smiling at him, he realized that he hadn’t seen her properly smile in ages. Not the mischievous smile that had made him want to be her friend in the first place. He tried not to think about how much it would hurt her when she had, inevitably, to give Hannah up.

“Daunting,” said Tonks, “isn’t it?”

The waitress came back with their food right then, and so Remus didn’t have a chance to ask her what she meant. They dropped the subject of Muggle Hannah and chatted a little about the truth commission and a lot about trainee Aurors (including Harry, who she said was doing well) and what a miserable nightmare it was to be nearly the most senior of the Aurors after only six years on the job, one of which didn’t properly count because she’d spent it—

“Fighting evil?” suggested Remus.

Tonks threw an onion at him; it plonked off his nose. “In hiding, I was going to say.”

“At least you’re brilliant at it.”

“You only think you want a job,” said Tonks, picking at the remains of her pasta. “Once you’ve got it you’ll hate it.”

“You’ll be brilliant at it though,” prompted Remus.

Tonks looked up. “I’ve been horrible today, haven’t I? Of course you’ll be brilliant at it, the commission. They’re lucky to have you.”

“You haven’t been horrible,” said Remus, bracingly. He felt particularly affectionate toward Tonks just now, as if he were watching a baby take its first fall after learning to walk. He wanted to say: _This is what love is like, when you can’t do anything about it. You’ll get used to it. You’ll be all right,_ except he knew that was patronizing.

Patronizing, and he was not sure that he himself qualified exactly as “all right.” He didn’t want to know whether Tonks thought he was or not.

* * *

When Remus got home, he was distracted, trying to think of a way to make it hurt less when Tonks had to get rid of Muggle Hannah; and he forgot to shut the door quietly, which set off Mrs. Black. He whispered, “Fuck,” and set his jaw as he wrestled her curtain closed and got her silent again. When he had money, he was going to have her removed. Set her on fire, maybe. He couldn’t think why Sirius hadn’t done it himself yet.

Sirius didn’t come downstairs to help with his mother’s portrait, which tended to mean that it was a bad day. When he didn’t shout back to Remus’s “I’m home,” that confirmed it. Remus expected that he would be holed up in his room, and it was a shock—Remus jolted hard and stepped back with a hand to his chest—to find him sitting in Remus’s armchair in the parlour.

“You all right,” said Remus, neutral.

Sirius’s eyes flicked up. His legs were folded under him in a way that would have made Remus’s knees ache, if he’d tried it. “Yeah,” he said. Not trying to make it sound convincing.

When Sirius was first back, properly back, when the Order got back together, Remus had tried to help. He had hovered over Sirius on his bad days, fetched him mug after mug of tea, covered him in blankets, chased away the other Order members who came looking for him. Sirius told him, eventually, that he didn’t want his fucking tea, he didn’t want to be fucking smothered in fucking blankets, and if there was anyone he didn’t want to see, he would fucking manage them himself.

So Remus said, now, “Good,” and went to the kitchen to make tea for himself. To his surprise, Sirius sloped in after Remus had put the kettle on and leaned in the doorframe, silent and watchful. His fingers twisted into the hem of his shirt, shifting it enough that Remus could see the curve of his hipbone.

“You’re too thin,” Remus said. To make doubly sure that Sirius wouldn’t take it as concern, he added, “Not becoming in a man your age, Pads.”

“How’s my cousin.”

“She’s seeing someone.” Remus wasn’t envious that Tonks was seeing a Muggle, not even envious that she was happy; but he was envious that she was _sure,_ and it was creeping into his voice.

“Oh, smashing.”

Remus turned to the counter for his milk. When he turned back, Sirius had disappeared.

Sirius was like that on bad days. Fey. It worried Remus badly, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. At least Sirius had spoken to him. He made himself busy with his tea and brought it out, with a book, into the parlour. Sirius was curled up in Remus’s armchair again, a dog now.

“Oi,” said Remus. “My chair.”

Sirius didn’t look up at him. Remus settled himself onto the sofa with his book and tried to focus on it. He kept thinking of Tonks’s wet eyes.

You could not save the people you loved.

With a soft thump, Sirius clambered out of Remus’s armchair. He got up on the sofa and sniffed Remus’s ear, then laid himself down, his head pillowed on Remus’s leg.

“Hullo,” said Remus, surprised. He let his hand rest on Sirius’s head, and Sirius tilted his head back slightly, as if he were asking for something. “What? You want me to scratch your ears?”

He was joking, but Sirius sighed a little and nuzzled his head back down onto Remus’s thigh. Since Azkaban, Sirius rarely let anyone touch him. He didn’t make a show of it, but Remus—who paid attention, maybe too much—had noticed. At school, Sirius was constantly draping limbs over whichever of them was closest and dispensing rib-cracking hugs on the slightest pretense. He didn’t do that anymore. Only rough, quick hugs, and only very occasionally. Only when it might be goodbye.

“Fine, fine,” said Remus. He scratched at Sirius’s ears, and Sirius sighed again, heavier this time, and wriggled closer, like a real dog. _I miss you,_ Remus thought, and he thought, _Come back to me._


	2. Chapter 2

**Excerpted from “The Ministry’s Truth Commission: Our Views,” by Rita Skeeter, _The Daily Prophet,_ 15 April 2000**

While most of the selection panel’s choices were uncontroversial, Minister of Magic Kingsley Shacklebolt raised eyebrows by forcing through the nomination of werewolf Remus J. Lupin. Critics have said that Shacklebolt’s selection of Lupin, forty years old, of no fixed abode, presages a bias in the truth commission in favour of former members of the Order of the Phoenix, a vigilante anti–Death Eater group of which Minister Shacklebolt was a prominent member.

When asked for comment, a representative of Minister Shackebolt’s office responded curtly: “The proceedings were recorded, and those recordings are available to the public. Votes on commissioners were unanimous in all cases.”

The remainder of the commission comprises Healer Patricia Lodge of the St. Mungo’s Spell Department, investigative reporter Jack Gascoyne (formerly of the Daily Prophet, fired from the staff at the speculative rag The Quibbler during the Second Wizarding War, now unemployed), Hogwarts teacher and head of Hufflepuff House Pomona Sprout, and Layla Amin, acting head of the Department of Magical Transportation’s Floo Network Authority.

For now, concerns that the so-called “truth commission” will be little more than a witch hunt for former enemies of the Order of the Phoenix remain unanswered.

* * *

Remus had supposed that they would be given a room at the Ministry to meet, but Kingsley had insisted that they were to choose their own location. If they needed office space at the Ministry, they could have it. The money to pay them for their work on the committee had already been deposited in a Gringotts vault, with payment set up automatically, and another lump sum available to them as a committee for miscellaneous expenses, if they went down all five to withdraw it.

“It has to be independent, or else—” Kingsley didn’t finish the sentence, but his eyebrows drew together the way they did when he was worried.

They met for the first time at the Leaky Cauldron, which had only just reopened after being destroyed in the riots that had followed the Battle of Hogwarts. Remus was there early; he had always liked being at classes early, in school. It made him feel central to whatever happened next. A cornerstone, and not an afterthought.

The second person to arrive was the other bloke on the commission, the journalist, Jack Gascoyne. After the full commission had been announced, Remus had thought of swotting up on all the members and decided against it. Sirius would have made fun of him for one thing. More importantly, he thought that what could be discovered about him through research would only be the least essential things about him. The medal, and the lycanthropy.

As soon as Jack Gascoyne came in, giving an apologetic smile as if he’d already made a mistake, Remus realized they had met once, recording Fred and George’s news programme. They hadn’t used real names, then.

“Hello,” he said. “I don’t know if you remember me—”

“Of course!” said Jack Gascoyne. “I knew who you were, of course, but—well, anyway. All over with now. I’m Jack.”

“Remus.” As they shook hands, Remus added, “Are you—back with the Prophet now?”

Jack put his chin up. He’d put on weight since they’d last met, and his brown hair looked thicker, cared for. Remus supposed he must be getting more regular meals now, and he felt a pang, thinking of Sirius. “Yes,” Jack said, defensive. “But I’m on a leave of absence. And anyway I wasn’t part of what was done to your lot. I resigned in ’96 when it became clear that the editorial position was—what it was.”

“Yes, of course,” said Remus helplessly. Was this how it would be? Each of them proving over and over again that they hadn’t been complicit? Merlin, if this was the commissioners, what would the interviews be like? “We all, I suppose—” He couldn’t think of how to finish the sentence. Finally he said, lamely, “—made choices like that.”

“Did you.” It wasn’t a question.

It wasn’t a question, and Remus didn’t know what answer Jack thought he already knew. This was the hell of being a werewolf, the way people assumed they had an inside line on what made you tick.

Pomona arrived then, saving Remus from answering. Bustling and friendly as always, she came in with the woman from the Ministry, and introduced her to Jack and Remus as Layla Amin. Ms. Amin did not invite them to use her first name, so Remus didn’t. She had thick hair done up in complicated braids, and a pointed nose set in a face that did not encourage familiarity. That made two commissioners who intimidated the hell out of Remus, and the Healer hadn’t even arrived yet.

 _This was a mistake,_ he thought.

“What department is it that you work in?” Remus asked, trying to be polite.

“Magical Transportation,” said Ms. Amin—and added nothing else.

Pomona said, “Layla got a great many people out, during the second war—misdirecting the Floo network, and setting up illegal Portkeys, and so on. It was a tremendous effort, almost entirely on her own, and of course at great personal risk.”

 _Bully for her,_ thought Remus.

“Remus was involved in the Order of the Phoenix,” Pomona went on, and Remus felt guilty for assuming that she’d been comparing him unfavourably to Ms. Amin. “He made great strides in recruiting werewolves to our side in the first war, and took tremendous risks in the second to keep werewolf groups from joining with Voldemort.”

 _Bully for him,_ said Layla Amin’s face.

The Healer was ten minutes late, which was, in Remus’s experience, typical. She told them all to call her Trish. Remus didn’t call her anything, and she barely looked at him. When he was small, his parents had taken him to more Healers than they could keep track of, searching and searching for a cure, and the great majority of them had refused to look at him.

Remus had expected that the Healer would take charge of everything, but it was Ms. Amin who took out a notebook and said, in a very businesslike way, “Have we all read through the remit provided by the Ministry?”

They all had, except the Healer.

“If you would read it through prior to our next meeting,” said Ms. Amin stiffly, “I think we’d all be appreciative of the effort. My understanding is that we will be provided with ten interviewers to take statements from the wizarding community.”

Pomona waved a hand at Tom, who had aged a thousand years since the war. “Let’s have some tea, shall we, before we dive into the thick of it. Tom, my dear, would you be a love and bring us a nice hot pot each of green and black? And soy milk for Layla?”

“That isn’t necessary,” said Ms. Amin.

“Don’t be silly,” said Pomona. “We don’t need to make this more unpleasant for ourselves than it needs to be.” She squeezed Ms. Amin’s wrist, and they smiled at each other.

Pomona was good at that, thought Remus, setting people at ease. He said, “Or more if we need them. Interviewers.”

“Yes,” said Ms. Amin. She touched two fingers to the hollow at the center of her collarbone, and tapped them there.

“It seems that allocation of funds won’t be an issue,” Jack said.

Pomona and the Healer both laughed, and Ms. Amin’s mouth curved into something that was not exactly a smile.

“I’ve said something funny?”

“The Ministry has very little money, just at present,” said Ms. Amin.

“Nobody,” said the Healer, “has any money.”

Jack said, “But then—” 

Ms. Amin’s face still had that amused look, curved lips and arched eyebrows. “If you work for the Ministry, it is clear that…” she said, but trailed off. She tapped her collarbone again.

“It all sounds a little desperate,” Remus said. “Reading between the lines of the remit. Whenever they talk about expenses, it’s, the Ministry in conjunction with the selection panel will review—a bit of _please don’t ask us because if you do we’ll have to do something about it._ At least it seemed that way to me.”

“In the least flattering terms,” said Ms. Amin, rather quelling, “yes, that’s what I meant.”

“We haven’t been asked here to flatter the Ministry,” Remus said, trying not to snap.

“Nor to canonize vigilante resistance groups.”

Had that been a jab at the Order of the Phoenix? Before Remus could decide, Ms. Amin went on, her voice as clear as the clink of Galleons. “I should like to come away from this meeting, and I hope you will each weigh in with your own opinions if you disagree, with a clear sense of how we wish to prioritize and preserve testimony for our final report. That will, I believe, shape the remainder of our planning and present us with action items for our path forward.”

Nobody disagreed on that score, but it was a long five hours after that of near-constant disagreement about everything else. After some amount of passionate arguing by the Healer, they agreed that they wouldn’t use Veritaserum even in the case of interviewees who had been Death Eaters. Veritaserum, she proclaimed with a level of emotion that made Remus uncomfortable, was unreliable (because of Occlumency, at which those in power in Voldemort’s regime were particularly well-trained), nearly impossible to get (because Voldemort’s regime used up all of the governmental supply), an inexcusable waste of resource to make more of (given that talented potion-makers were all too rare and dedicated mostly to replenishing badly-needed Healing potions), and expensive to boot.

Remus agreed with everything she said, and couldn’t bring himself to say so. He voted, along with Pomona and Ms. Amin, against using it; and Jack gave in with good humor.

They agreed, too, that their report should lay out the events that brought Voldemort to power, each time, as closely as they could agree upon them. They agreed that there would be lists of the dead, and that anyone accused of anything by any interviewee would be invited to come and give testimony in their own defense. Nobody would be compelled.

“No being,” Jack clarified.

“Nobody,” said Ms. Amin. “Not house-elves, either.”

The Healer sniffed, and everyone looked at her. She had shoved up the sleeves of her robe and attached them magically to her shoulders to keep them up, which gave her arms the look of a puppet show with the curtains just drawn back.

Remus did not say, “What?” He suspected he already knew.

“Yes, Trish?” said Pomona.

“I think we’re hamstringing our efforts,” said Trish.

Our efforts can hamstring you for all I care, Remus thought. “If our final report is to be credible, there’s a level of goodwill we have to maintain,” he said, carefully. “Compelling people to come forward with testimony—”

Trish waved her hands impatiently, and her sleeves fell down, one of them sloshing slightly into her tea. Scrunching her face in mild dismay, she wrung out the end of the wet sleeve and continued. “I mean that we’re hamstringing our efforts if we only issue specific invitations to people who have been _accused_ of something. If we’re to reach anything like a comprehensive narrative—”

“You reckon we should send invitations to anyone who’s mentioned,” Pomona said. “What a sensible notion.”

Ms. Amin bit into a biscuit, slightly too hard, so that her teeth clacked together. She was a decided sort of person. Aside from the fact that she seemed irritated with Remus for no reason he could discern, he thought he rather liked her. When she had finished chewing, she said, “It’s going to be quite the record-keeping endeavor. Who’s going to keep track of the people we’ve yet to invite?”

“Who’s going to keep track of who’s already come in, come to that?” Jack said. “This is going to be everyone in the wizarding world, nearly.”

“Come, now,” said Pomona, teasing a little. “Only wizarding Britain.”

They all laughed a little, not because it was funny, but because it was impossible. Impossible, and still what they had to do.

Pomona felt strongly that Muggles should be included in lists of the dead, and Ms. Amin felt strongly that they should not, since they would not be invited to give testimony and would not see the final report. Remus argued fiercely for specific, targeted outreach to beings other than humans, which everyone else—even Pomona, though she said so politely—considered a waste of limited and valuable time and resources.

Ms. Amin, who Remus supposed must be a Ravenclaw, had read a number of reports by truth commissions from the Muggle world, Chile and South Africa and Guatemala. She wanted everyone to come to their next meeting with a list of five specific events or areas of society that they wanted to write special reports on. Remus said, “I can already tell you that mine will be treatment of beings other than humans,” and the Healer said, “I can already tell you I’m going to forget to do it,” and Remus wished Sirius was there so much that he thought he might accidentally conjure him.

* * *

When he got home, Harry was sitting on the stoop at Grimmauld Place, smoking a cigarette.

“Fuck,” said Remus, stopping short. It was Monday. Harry came round for dinner on Mondays, and Remus had forgotten about it completely.

“It’s all right,” Harry said.

“ _Hell._ ”

Harry laughed. “Remus, it doesn’t matter. Don’t tell Sirius I’m out here having a fag and we’ll be square, yeah?”

It was on Sirius’s behalf that Remus was angry with himself, but he gave his best effort at a chuckle and sat down next to Harry. “Bad for you,” he said half-heartedly, referring to the smoking. “How’s work?”

“I’m not meant to worry you with it,” said Harry. He offered Remus the cigarette.

“They’re bad for me as well. Worse for me, in fact. Worry me with what?”

Harry shrugged one shoulder, and Remus resisted the impulse to pat it. Remus had proposed their Monday dinners to give Sirius something to look forward to, since he hardly ever seemed to leave the house now that Voldemort was gone. But Harry looked older and older every time he came, and Remus worried. He had to remind himself that Molly was already asking all the questions Remus wanted to, and that Harry wouldn’t thank him (or Sirius) for doing the same.

“Auror stuff,” Harry said, finally.

Chaos and danger, just as Harry had known every year of his life since coming to Hogwarts. He was nineteen years old. The world had never been fair.

“If you need to go through spells,” Remus offered.

Harry nodded. “Sirius said the same. Said he might change out the—what’s it, drawing room? The one downstairs. For a practice room. Pad the walls, you know.” He waved the hand that held the cigarette, scattering ash over both their shoes.

When Remus didn’t answer, Harry sighed heavily. “Look, I know, all right? But he’s—if he isn’t leaving the house anyway, maybe it’s good that he’s got something to occupy him.”

They had talked around it a little, the way Sirius had hidden himself away since Voldemort died. Never as openly as this. Remus glanced at Harry and found him staring fixedly at his ash-covered shoes, as if he was afraid he had gone too far. “I don’t know what’s good,” said Remus.

Harry gave a chuckle. “Isn’t that your job now? To know what’s good?”

It was a joke, but Remus was abruptly furious at the world they were giving Harry and the rest of the kids. It shouldn’t have been like this, the two of them sitting on Sirius’s doorstep and fretting over him. James and Lily shouldn’t be dead, they should be here, they should be goddamn here, making Harry go back to finish school, fretting over him, protecting him. Remus shouldn’t have been chosen as some fucking arbiter of truth and righteousness, there shouldn’t be any need for it, it should be clean, their lives should be fucking _clean._ More than anything, it wasn’t right what Sirius had become. A ghost of himself, haunting Grimmauld Place.

“Sorry,” Harry muttered.

Remus shook himself, and made an effort. “For what? Don’t be sorry. I’m—look, you’re right, probably. I’d rather he had something to occupy his hands. It’s good of you to think of it.”

He wanted to say, _I’m worried about him too,_ but that would have been both disloyal and more honest than he was willing to be.

After Harry finished his cigarette, they went inside together, and Harry ran upstairs to wash his hands. Sirius was doing the washing-up in the kitchen, singing quietly to himself. He couldn’t carry a tune to save his life, but Remus liked listening to him sing anyway, the familiar, consistent, droning hum. Remus waited for Sirius to stop before he said, “I’m dreadful.”

Sirius turned around. For a wonder, he was smiling. “You’re not dreadful.”

“I am,” said Remus. “I forgot about dinner. I completely forgot.”

“I’ll think of a suitable punishment for you later,” Sirius said.

Remus took a moment to recover from that. In very nearly a normal voice, he said, “Was the food all right?” He’d made lasagna and left it in the refrigerator to be baked.

“Yeah, of course. You’re brilliant at pasta.” In a single fluid movement, Sirius waved the baking dish into the cabinet, turned around to the little kitchen table, and pushed out the opposite-side chair with his foot for Remus to sit in. “Harry still here?”

“Ran to the loo, I think,” said Remus, sitting down. Sirius sat down opposite him, slouched low with his legs crossed at the ankle.

“Don’t look so guilty, Moony, I know he was out having a fag. How was your thing? All right? Was it worth missing dinner for?”

“Was it fuck,” Remus said. Sirius grinned; he liked it when Remus swore. “Harry said you might change the downstairs drawing room out for a practice room. I could help if you wanted? Days I’m not working. Clean the place up, chuck out the old furniture, and that.”

“I used to hide in that big armoire,” Sirius said, his voice a little distant. “When I was a kid, the one in the drawing room.”

It wasn’t really an answer.

Sirius shook his head and kicked lightly at Remus’s ankle, the toe of his boot nudging up against the cuff of Remus’s trousers. “Was it awful?”

If he died of anything, it would not be his lycanthropy and it would not be wizards who hated him but it would be Sirius Black’s voice gentle and solicitous, Sirius Black’s dark eyes on his face like a caress. Remus was still rallying when Harry came into the kitchen, smelling of smoke.

“Did you offer him what’s left?” Harry said briskly; and like that, the moment was broken.

“Doesn’t deserve it, the rotten skiver,” said Sirius. “He’s been sat here shivering like a wet week waiting for me to feed him.”

“Nearly the full moon and this is how he speaks to me, Harry. My oldest friend. _Is_ there food left? I had a bit of steak and kidney pie at the Cauldron but you know Tom’s cooking.” Remus swung himself up and opened the refrigerator.

Harry took the chair Remus vacated. “Was the commission thing good, Remus? Forgot to ask.”

“Yeah,” said Remus. It was easier to lie when Sirius wasn’t looking straight at him. Anyway, he wasn’t lying. It wasn’t a lie. The wizarding world would have despised him whether the commission existed or not. “Yeah, yeah, fine. You know. Loads of talking, not much got resolved. Do you think we should publish lists of the Muggle dead?”

“Are you publishing lists of the dead at all?” said Harry.

“Likely.” The lasagna, when he poked a finger into the middle bit, was still warmish. Remus stood with the refrigerator door open, half trying to decide if it was worth the bother of reheating, and half avoiding Harry’s and Sirius’s eyes. He decided against reheating it and leaned against the sink, behind Sirius, to eat it straight from the baking dish.

Sirius twisted around to him. “Not being horrible, Moony, but what would it be for? The Muggles’ families couldn’t ever know about it.”

“For us, I think.” The lasagna was good, even cold.

“To see how much we mucked up the rest of the country?” Harry said.

Chewing, Remus nodded.

Harry and Sirius exchanged a look. Sometimes Harry looked so like James that it was like seeing a ghost. How many bloody times had James and Sirius exchanged that look, the one that meant they were a team?

“Are you going to be in agonies over this?” Sirius asked. He was clearly annoyed, which Remus thought unfair.

Remus swallowed. “Don’t be so dramatic. I only asked a question, I wasn’t— _I_ didn’t kill any Muggles, I’m only asking if the commission—”

“Yeah, well, I know you, and I know you’re going to get yourself in a frenzy about your own personal responsibility and why didn’t you do this and that and why didn’t you go with Harry and why didn’t you save everyone—”

Bit late for that, Remus thought. “The job _is_ to sort out why it all happened. What happened exactly and why we all let it happen. It isn’t about me, it’s about the wizarding world at, you know—” He waved his hands. “At large.”

Sirius’s fingers were beating out a restless rhythm against the shabby wooden table. “I didn’t want you to do it in the first place.”

“You said I’d be good at it.”

“You will be good at it, but that doesn’t mean I want you—” The words stumbled coming out of Sirius’s mouth, and Remus raised one eyebrow, which he could do and Sirius could not and he knew Sirius hated it. “Doesn’t mean I—that you’d be—I’m—”

“You can be good at something and it can still make you miserable,” offered Harry.

Sirius looked relieved. “Exactly. Exactly.”

Remus put a large bite of food in his mouth to stop himself from answering in haste and saying something he would regret. Like _I don’t belong to you,_ which would give away everything.

“Yes,” said Harry.

“Ymph mmt?” said Remus.

“Yes, the lists of the Muggle dead. You’re right, we ought to have it on record. Written down, so nobody forgets. That was how Voldemort worked, wasn’t it? Doing horrible things to people he thought didn’t matter. We ought to say they mattered.” Harry looked across at Sirius for approval. He was so young, sometimes.

“Talk a good game, don’t you?” Sirius teased, making such an obvious—to Remus—effort to lighten the mood that it caught at Remus’s heart. He wanted to help, to make a joke that bolstered Sirius’s lighter tone, but he couldn’t think of anything clever to say. Sirius and James had always been the two that made jokes.

“Well, I am the Chosen One,” said Harry.

Remus chucked the remaining butter roll at Harry’s head, and Sirius let out a bark of laughter.

* * *

Later, after Harry had gone and Sirius had curled himself up in the corner of the parlour couch and Remus had settled into his wingback armchair with a quill and parchment, Remus remembered to ask, “Is Harry all right at work?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Sirius. “He was fighting Voldemort face to face seven years ago, he’s probably the best at combating dark magic in the world. He’s fine at work. Worry about your own job, why don’t you?”

Remus closed his free hand into a fist, dug his nails into the skin of his palm. “I was only asking.”

“Are you his mum?” Sirius’s voice was very sharp. “Or are you a near-stranger who taught him in school half his life ago? Merlin. You’re not responsible for everything, you know, Moony, not everything’s in your control.”

“You’re one to talk.”

Sirius was on his feet at once, his old self, spoiling for a fight as if they were twenty years younger. “The fuck’s that mean?”

“It means that you—oh, let’s not fight, I’m tired. Let’s leave it, all right? I’m sorry I—let’s leave it.”

“Fuck you then,” Sirius spat. “I’m going to bed.”

Remus thought: I didn’t do anything. He knew it wasn’t anything personal, just Sirius being angry that he couldn’t protect Harry. Behind that, miserable and guilty, he also felt very, very tired of folding himself smaller to accommodate Sirius.

When they were in school, Remus found it hideously unfair that there should be so much of Sirius. He bounded from class to class as if he would never run out of energy; he managed to be bored and brilliant in every subject, even Divination; he threw money around as if it were nothing, Galleons on idiotic joke products to tease James; and Merlin, he was beautiful. Too _much,_ Remus used to think. He was maddened by it, the costly excess that was Sirius Black.

Since Azkaban, Sirius was less than Remus remembered, a dulled and muted version who occasionally—less and less often since Voldemort had died—flashed into his old vividness.

A door slammed upstairs.

Remus remembered that shabby bedsit Sirius had had for a bit, before he got his inheritance, a summer sublet with ants and mice both despite all the spells Sirius had cast to dissuade them. The neighbors used to complain bitterly that Sirius was slamming his doors too loudly.

“I don’t slam doors!” Sirius protested to Remus.

“You always slam doors.”

Sirius put on a look of elaborate betrayal. “Et tu, Remus? I don’t! I only close them, I close doors, do they want me not to _close_ my doors?”

James put a spell on one of the doors so it wouldn’t make a noise when Sirius closed it, and in the two weeks it took Sirius to notice, he kept insisting to Remus that his doors weren’t closing properly. 

Remus had forgotten about that.

The thing was that when Sirius was angry, he was the most like the person Remus had known before Azkaban. The nearest approximation. Remus always had the idiotic impulse to catch at Sirius’s wrist (as Sirius was swearing at him, and saying horrible things, the way he did when he was in a temper) and say, _Stay._

Because it never did stay. The temper faded, and the vividness along with it. Remus hated himself for wanting Sirius to shout at him, and for wanting Sirius to stop shouting at him, and nothing between them would ever be simple again.


	3. Chapter 3

**Excerpted from Witness Testimony Archives for the Commission of Inquiry into the Wizarding Wars, 1978–1998**

Statement Taker: Autumn Holder  
Date: 19 May 2000  
Witness: Molly Weasley (age 49)

He was a good boy, a brave boy. Merlin, he gave me trouble growing up. I couldn’t take my eye off of him for a second. He was always getting the little ones into trouble. Ron and Ginny worshipped him, Ginny especially. It didn’t matter how many times I told her no. The second I took my eyes off of her, she’d be off after Fred and George again.

I’d have killed any of You-Know-Who’s people for him, you know. I killed a woman to protect my girl, and I’ve never lost an hour’s sleep over it. You don’t always get the chance. So many times, you aren’t—I wasn’t there, when they needed me to be. Not in the right place.

* * *

After Remus got sacked from Hogwarts and found out Sirius was innocent, he woke up every morning sick with dread. It always took him a few minutes to place the cause of it. He would think, blearily, _Wolf night?_ and then remember. Not wolf night. It was just that he had lost the only job he’d ever gotten honestly. It was just that he had betrayed his best friend so badly there could be no possibility of forgiveness.

That first year, when Sirius was in hiding, Remus visited whenever he could, and apologized every time for believing that Sirius would have given up James and Lily to Voldemort.

“What else were you to think?” Sirius always said. “I thought you were the spy, and I’d far less reason than you had.”

But that didn’t make anything right between them, and Remus had kept thinking, hoping, that if he brought it up again, pressed on the bruise enough times—

He didn’t know what he hoped would happen. That he would forgive himself, maybe. Maybe that Sirius would admit he was angry, and they could talk about it properly, and then the distance would be gone and they could go back to normal.

Eventually, Sirius had said, “Leave it alone, Remus,” in a tone of great finality.

Eventually, Remus realized how much Sirius had changed, and he tried to convince himself that was why it was strange between them now. Nothing Remus had done. Just the twelve years spent apart, and accounting for the fact that for Sirius it had been twelve years of living hell.

“And that helped, did it?” Tonks said very skeptically, when he told her about it later.

In a way, it had helped. It had let him push the dread to the back of his mind, so that he could wake up without feeling pinned down by the weight of it.

The month after the first meeting of the truth commission was much the same. Every day felt like a wolf night. “I shall have to start smoking,” he told Sirius, only half joking.

Sirius wrinkled his nose. For someone who had prided himself on his lawlessness, Sirius could be fastidious, and he insisted that the smell of cigarette smoke made his head ache. (Just as well: The idea of Sirius smoking, lips brushing against his fingers as he took a deep drag, did funny things to Remus’s stomach.)

“Or substantially increase my intake of firewhisky.”

“I’ll join you,” said Sirius, with a smile that was nearly like his old one.

The _Prophet_ seemed to be sticking with its accusation of bias and Ministry interference, and Remus, as the sole commissioner who had also been a member of the Order of the Phoenix, was getting the brunt of it. After Pomona caught him fending off two _Prophet_ reporters outside of Florean Fortescue’s old place (now a used wand shop) on his way to a strategy meeting, she’d insisted that they take Kingsley up on his offer of Ministry offices.

(Remus suspected Rita Skeeter of having paid off some of the shopkeepers in Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley to keep a watch for him. He could not decide if that was a paranoid thing to suspect, or a reasonable one.)

Unexpectedly, he was finding Ms. Amin his best ally on the commission. He hadn’t suggested a shift to first-name terms, but they were giving each other covert half-smiles now when Jack began name-dropping or Pomona told a lengthy story about one of her students to back up an argument she was making. Ms. Amin was, he thought, the cleverest of the five of them.

“If we all ask people we know,” said Jack when they were building the witness list.

Ms. Amin said, “If we all ask people we know, what?”

“To be,” Jack said, impatient, “on the witness list. And then build it outward from there.”

“If we all ask people we know to be on the witness list, what?”

Remus bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. When Jack looked at him for support, he kept his face still.

Pomona, who did not like to see any of them discomfited, jumped in to help. “I think Jack means that we’d have a representative sample then. Is that right?”

“Yeah,” said Jack, in a tone that said _Obviously._ He brushed imaginary crumbs off his lap.

“Representative in what sense?” said Remus.

“Oh come on. You _know_ what sense, this is—in the sense that we’re from different houses, we’re—we work in different fields, or—” He cast a sideways glance at Remus. “Don’t work, as the case may be.”

Remus did not flinch. He was good at not flinching.

“Our first testimony,” said Ms. Amin, “is coming from Molly Weasley.”

Both Pomona and the Healer tensed slightly. Remus thought he probably had as well.

“Give it a rest,” Ms. Amin said. “I’m not having a go at Hogwarts’s favourite mum. There is a perception in the community that this commission is the arm of a Ministry propaganda machine—”

The Healer laughed out loud, and everyone looked at her. She sobered quickly, then burst out laughing again. “I’m sorry!” she said, one hand trying to hide her mouth. “But that’s—good heavens, propaganda machine, when they've barely managed—I don’t know what, they’ve barely managed to keep funding flowing to St. Mungo’s. They’re nowhere near organized enough—” Another laugh bubbled out of her. “To have—a propaganda—”

It was a little funny. Gallows humor, really, considering Remus was badgered by critical _Prophet_ reporters everywhere he went.

(“Mr. Lupin!” one of them had called at him in front of Gringotts. “How do you respond to claims that Minister Shacklebolt intends this committee to initiate a process of lustration in—”

“No comment,” said Remus. He had to look up _lustration_ later.)

“In _any_ case,” Ms. Amin said, which was what she always said when she felt the other commissioners had introduced too much levity into the proceedings.

That had been the third week. Sign-ups to give testimony were woefully under what they had predicted, and Ms. Amin had sensibly let five of their ten statement-takers go back to their regular Ministry jobs. “For the time being,” she said, “only until we’ve cause to need them again,” but Remus suspected glumly that they’d never have enough people to require ten full-time staff for interviews.

In the fourth week, Ms. Amin brought the witness list in and began laying out statistics that even Jack had to admit were grim.

“Sixty percent Hufflepuffs,” Ms. Amin reported.

“Badgers!” trilled the Healer.

Ms. Amin said, “Two. Percent. Slytherins. If we’re going to be a sham, we might as well throw in the towel now and give the money to Trish.”

The Healer beamed, then said worriedly to Remus, “Not me personally. You know. The hospital, she means.”

“It’s not a real suggestion, Healer Lodge,” said Ms. Amin.

“She knows that,” Pomona said, gentle. “Layla, thank you so much for bringing this information in. Apart from being quite an admirable testament to the moral character of Hufflepuffs—” She winked at Jack, with whom she and the Healer maintained a joking House rivalry. “The numbers as they stand are certainly not what we would want.”

“Oh, I’m not finished.” Ms. Amin waved her wand—she was a very unflourishing wand user, which would have bothered Sirius no end—and displayed another list. “Ninety-seven percent. Ninety-seven. Percent. Of the list. Comprises people who were referred to us personally by one of us. Mostly Pomona or Trish.”

“Badgers,” the Healer whispered.

Ms. Amin flicked her wrist. Another list, a very short one. “Two non-humans. Not two percent. Two. Which—” Another flick. “Actually constitutes nearly two percent, because in the month since we began accepting witnesses and placing them on a schedule, we’ve only got a hundred and twenty-six witches and wizards—and two house-elves—to put down their names.”

 _Hagrid’s half non-human,_ Remus thought, but did not say. “Do we have a number that we want to reach? We’ve still got to take all the statements, and a hundred and thirty people will take some time to get through.”

“My point,” said Ms. Amin, “is that we’ve got to—”

Their dinner arrived then, courtesy of one of the statement-takers who had nothing to do yet but whose employment as a gopher made Remus feel anxious from an ethical perspective. Remus was halfway through his hamburger (not quite rare enough for a wolf night), before he registered what the end of the sentence had been.

“Why is that your point?” he said abruptly.

Ms. Amin was in the middle of praying. She always said a quiet grace before eating anything, even a handful of pistachios at the Leaky Cauldron, and Remus could not help thinking that it must be quite relieving to have something that you believed in with such clarity.

“What?” said the Healer, since nobody else was answering.

The last three words of the grace were _shanti, shanti, shanti._ Ms. Amin said them and looked up. “Hm?” she said.

“Why is the point of all that to reach out to _Slytherin_ victims? Slytherins are—”

“Before you say anything else,” said Pomona, in her most professorial voice, “I’d like to remind you that Layla is a Slytherin.”

Remus bit his tongue hard enough to taste blood. “Slytherins,” he said, “were the perpetrators of the vast majority of war crimes—”

“Oh, here it is.” Ms. Amin’s face was a little flushed.

“I’m sorry if you don’t like to hear it, but the fact is—”

“We are here,” said Ms. Amin, very sharply, “to establish what ‘the fact’ is. Would you disagree?”

She always did this: Asked pointed questions until you realized you’d been wrong. Remus generally liked it. Less when she was aiming it his way. Sirius would have laughed at him.

“Are we here to chase after the stories of the people who were harmed least in the wars?” he asked. “Are we here to pretend that Slytherin House didn’t produce nearly all of Voldemort’s Death Eaters, not to mention Dolores Umbridge, who—”

“We’re here to ensure that the voices of the victims of this war and its aftermath are not lost.” Where other people raised their voices to quarrel, Ms. Amin enunciated more and more clearly, biting off each word as if it had dissatisfied her.

“Exactly,” said Remus. “The victims. Not the perpetrators.”

“Yes the perpetrators,” put in the Healer, rather meekly. “Remember? We’re asking anyone in who gets named in—”

“Shut _up,_ Healer Lodge!” snapped Ms. Amin.

“Hey,” said Jack.

“No, by all means.” Ms. Amin got to her feet. “Please. By all means, let’s make sure that blame is placed only upon the people most at risk under the current regime. How absolutely unprecedented of us. Let’s ask the Ministry what they’d like our final report to look like, while we’re in.”

She set her napkin down and picked her way around the messy chairs and paper stacks in the office. At the door, she half-turned, as if she had something to add, but then thought better of it and went out.

* * *

Back at Grimmauld Place, Remus elbowed past three reporters begging for comment and found the entryway full of boxes and discarded packing material, and Mrs. Black’s portrait screaming bloody murder. That would make for good colour commentary in the _Prophet,_ how the home of werewolf commissioner Remus Lupin appeared to contain a woman being tortured.

“Sirius?” he called, but his voice was drowned out by Mrs. Black. Old hag. He’d tried setting the portrait on fire but it was (of course) fire-proof. He bounded upstairs and found Sirius in the parlour, surrounded by still more boxes and still more packing material, reading a slim paper manual.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Sirius looked up, and Remus caught his breath. It’s you, he thought. Oh, God, it’s you.

“Look at all this Muggle stuff!” said Sirius. He leapt to his feet with an agility Remus envied and dashed over to the door to catch Remus’s wrist and drag him in. “I got all this Muggle stuff, look!”

Remus looked. The thing Sirius was gesturing at was black and thin and heavy with a large shiny plate across the front. Remus had seen similarish things before, he thought, in Muggle food shops and pubs sometimes, but those had been sort of bright and garish and noisy, and this one was dull and silent. “What is it?”

“It’s a telly,” announced Sirius proudly.

(His fingers were still wrapped around Remus’s wrist.)

“What’s it for?”

“Loads of stuff! I made the Muggles at the shop tell me how it all works together. It’s like a proper little show, you can watch shows on it, and there’s this thing called Eurovision that they showed me a bit of—everybody dresses up in mad costumes and sort of—sings songs, and then if you’ve got one of those Muggle, um, whatsit, they’re like sending message by Patronus, what’s the name of those?”

Remus was laughing. Sirius was irresistible like this, he always had been. “I don’t know, Pads.”

“Well, it’s like you can send a message by Patronus, anyway, I’ll ask Harry what they’re called, and anyway, you can tell them which song is best, and then the one that the most people say is best wins!” Sirius stopped himself, let go of Remus’s arm, and shook his head. “I mean, that’s—you know, that’s only one thing it does, but then, _then,_ look at _this_ lot.”

He waved one arm at a massive pile of thin, shiny boxes in the corner of the room. Rubbing his thumb absently over the inside of his wrist, Remus went over to look. They all had pictures of grim-looking men on the front and titles like _Fight Club_ and _The Bourne Identity._

“What are these?” he said.

“They are,” announced Sirius, “deebeedees. Said the bloke in the shop. And you can put them into this other machine that goes with the telly, and they play like shows. Whenever you like.” He grinned at Remus, a smile that was not the sharp-toothed one he gave most often these days, but a young and open smile, a smile for skiving off classes, a smile for coming downstairs for dinner just in time to snag the last piece of pumpkin pie.

(He was so beautiful, he was so fucking beautiful. Remus would give anything, anything, anything.)

“What,” Sirius said.

“What?” said Remus.

“You’ve got that look on, you’ve got that Moony-look.”

(Remus couldn’t bear that he would not get to keep this Sirius, this joyful and energetic Sirius.)

“Is this what all the boxes downstairs are?” Remus asked. He was trying to sound stern because that was who he was to Sirius, that was what Sirius had always meant when he said “that Moony-look,” but he was grinning, too. How could he not?

“Oh!” Sirius was off and moving again. “Moony, come _on,_ ” he called over his shoulder as he bounded out of the parlour and thundered down the stairs. “Come on come on come _on._ ”

Remus followed him downstairs, past the master bedroom where nobody slept, and into the grim old drawing room. It was one of the rooms they’d hardly bothered to try cleaning because the task was so daunting, but now it was full of things Remus had never seen in Grimmauld Place before. Cushions of all different colours, an array of paint pots, boxes and boxes of brightly coloured packages labeled _Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes._

“You went out and bought all this?” Remus asked.

“I wanted—” Sirius’s voice faded a little. “Yeah, I went—not the joke shop stuff, I had that lot delivered. But the rest of it, yeah, I. It’s—I know I’ve not been—”

You’ve been perfect, Remus thought. “It’s good. Good to know you’re getting out, I—” Helpless with honesty, he said, “I worry about you, mate.”

He expected Sirius to be angry, tell him to mind his own business. You could not, with Sirius, indicate that you perceived weakness. He would fight back with everything he had. Every weapon. Remus knew it in his bones.

But Sirius took two steps closer to him, and Sirius said, low, “Is that why you’ve—” He pressed a thumb to the skin between Remus’s eyes. Remus could not breathe or think. “That creasey spot? Because of me being a bit stuck?”

“Not, er,” Remus managed. “Not. Er. Exclusively. But. Er.”

Sirius’s eyes flicked down to his mouth. Desire pounded through Remus, a kick-drum-beat of it. He wanted Sirius, he had always wanted him. Vivid, excessive Sirius Black.

Sirius stepped back. Remus exhaled.

“It’s,” said Sirius. “It’s easier when. Muggle places are easier. I dunno.”

They were treading, light-footed, through a minefield, and all Remus could think about was how badly he wanted to touch. To put his hand on Sirius’s cheek and draw him closer. Words were landmines, but skin against skin would be simple.

“I know some Muggle restaurants,” Remus said.

He had never known Sirius’s face so undefended. “You’re—look, Remus—” A breath. “I don’t need you to, to—”

“Don’t be so silly,” said Remus, steering them through to safety. “I’ve got to eat, haven’t I, I’m not doing you any favours. If you want to eat with me, that would be lovely.” Not lovely. He had meant to say, then you’re welcome to join me. He was too tired to do this well.

“Tonight?”

“I—” Remus tipped his chin up, indicating the moon that would soon begin to rise outside. “It’s a wolf night.”

“Dinner, and then an adventure. Like old times, Moony, can we?” He was smiling his most wicked smile, and he looked so much like his old self that Remus nearly said yes.

“Sirius, we can’t. I could hurt someone.” (There were two of them: Sirius to propose the impossible. Remus to refuse.)

The light in Sirius’s eyes flickered, and went out. Remus’s throat ached, seeing it go.

“All right,” said Sirius. “I’ll—maybe get a start cleaning this lot out. Start with that bloody thing.” He nodded at a massive wood-and-glass display case. “I used to hide in there, did I ever tell you? When I was quite small, I fit into it. That bit at the bottom.”

He was talking very fast. Hiding what he felt. Remus knew him too well.

“For some peace and quiet,” Remus offered.

Sirius huffed a tiny laugh. “Yeah. Bit hard to come by with my mum and Kreacher. Where do you go?”

Caught off guard by the sudden subject change, Remus said, “What?”

“For wolf night. Is it—do you have somewhere that’s all right? A bit of quiet, or—do you have somewhere? I know it isn’t any of my business, only I—” Sirius stretched his mouth out into something not entirely unlike a smile, and laughed as if he were making a joke. “I fucking hate it when you’re not where I can see you.”

Surely the question itself was a joke. _A bit of quiet,_ on wolf night? When Fenrir Greyback had seen to it personally that the English supply of Wolfsbane Potion was destroyed? And Sirius was asking him this, _now,_ after how many full moons? Remus bit his tongue and tasted blood (idiot, using his teeth like that, at this time of month).

He said, evenly, “I manage, Sirius.”

Sirius nodded, and kept nodding. “Good, then. Well. Good. Off you go, then.”

Yes. Off he went.

* * *

Before the Wolfsbane potion was invented, werewolves rarely lived past fifty. Human bones were not made to stretch and change; human hearts could not bear the strain of the shift, month after month.

The Ministry of Magic gave Remus a medal. He had to go to a ceremony, and accept it. Valour in combating the rise of fascism in the wizarding world. Remus thought it shouldn’t count as valour if you were going to die anyway. Since he was five he had known that he would die young. _Werewolves rarely live past fifty,_ said his Healer, the good one, in Prague, and there it was: His expiry date. Fifty had seemed, then, impossibly old.

“What about Animagi?” he asked McGonagall, desperate, in their sixth year. “Do Animagi—is it the same, do they, the transformation, does—”

She was gentle with him. Minerva could be gentle, he knew now. “It isn’t the same for us,” she said. “Would you like a book about it?”

Sirius found the book hidden under Remus’s pillow, and they all three made fun of him for weeks. Being a worrywart and giving the game away to Pince, they said. Loopy Lupin, said James affectionately, swatting at his shoulder with the book. Always have to know everything.

He was nearly forty now, and the shift was getting harder.

* * *

Some months, the wolf fell asleep halfway through the night, and Remus was able to wake up rested. When he had enough money, he bought large slabs of raw meat at the butcher before coming to the Shrieking Shack, and that tended to send the wolf to sleep, although if the wolf’s system didn’t manage to digest it quickly enough, Remus was sometimes sick in the morning.

The wolf had not slept, that night. Remus woke up with a ragged, bloody gash in his ankle. His muscles had seized up, and it took four increasingly painful tries before he was able to scrabble himself to his knees. When he inhaled, his lungs hurt, and his head ached muddily.

One of these nights I won’t wake up, he thought. Then there will only be Sirius left.

He crawled over to the place in the wall where he always hid his wand (the wolf, luckily, had no interest in it) and healed the wound in his leg. He felt sick and dehydrated, and—as sometimes happened after a wolf night—he could not make his mind accept the damp, nearly hairless bits of flesh as his own arms and legs. Get up, he ordered himself. Molly was coming in to the Ministry today, to give her testimony to the statement takers, and he had told her that he would take her to lunch afterward.

(The handsome bartender at the Ministry pub knew about the truth commission and had set up a tab for Remus. It was kind. Remus knew that it was kind.)

He couldn’t miss it. He had given his word.

Molly Weasley had lost her brothers, her husband, her son. She had lost more than any one person should have to lose, and she was still standing, and he had given his word. Bracing tentatively against the splintery wood of the nearest wall, he levered himself standing with arms that did not feel like his own. He wanted Sirius so badly that he couldn’t breathe.

Sirius would be brisk and fond. He was always best when you most needed him. _Trying to skive off work, tragic,_ he would say, propping one of his shoulders under Remus’s armpit and hauling Remus’s arm around the other.

Remus had intended to go to the Ministry by Floo, but he couldn’t quite face it. He Apparated instead and was nearly sick on the street outside the Ministry. Something with ginger would help, he thought. Ginger tea. If Sirius were there he would make ginger tea, and a face to go with it so that Remus would know how disgusting it was.

He got his badge (“Remus Lupin, Truth Commission”) and flushed himself down to the floor where they were taking Molly’s statement. They had chosen a room with comfortable armchairs and wide windows through which magic-induced sun dazzled and made Remus’s headache worse. Molly was there already, her face pale, twisting a handkerchief into complicated knots.

“All right, Moll?” he said.

Molly looked up and managed a smile. “Remus, dear,” she said, and she got up and gave him a hug. He melted into it; wolf nights always made him more tactile.

“Thank you,” he said, breaking the hug reluctantly, “for coming in. You’re good to do it.”

“It’s important.” Molly smiled at him, again. How she could do it, he didn’t know. Some days he didn’t understand how any of them, anyone in the whole of the wizarding world, kept their heads above water. “I spoke with the woman your friend recommended, from the _Prophet._ I do hope it will draw in more testimony.”

“I’m sure it will. Thank you, really.”

Molly huffed. “It’s you we should be thanking. I imagine this work is very difficult.”

The truth was that it hadn’t begun to get difficult yet, if you discounted the constant attention from the _Prophet_ and a few of the wizarding radio stations. Difficult would be when the testimony began. When they heard about torture, false imprisonment, wands broken in half and unable to be repaired because Ollivander’s was closed. No way to defend yourself, your children, against the Death Eaters and worse than that, against the witches and wizards you had believed were your friends.

Remus, at least, had never trusted anyone to begin with. He had known from his earliest childhood how thin and weak, how easily snapped the bonds of friendship could be. For the rest of the wizarding world, the Muggle-borns, it must have been quite a shock.

He went back to his own office while Molly gave her actual statement. Hard enough for her to go back through everything that had happened, without Remus standing there pointlessly. And anyway, he knew what she would say. He knew everything that had happened, the Prewetts and Arthur and Fred, who had died when he was not quite the age that Harry was now.

Nothing was fair.

“Oh, you’re here,” said Ms. Amin when he came in.

“I’m taking Molly to lunch.”

Ms. Amin ignored him.

Remus tried again. “Do any of that lot seem useful? I couldn’t make hide nor hair of them.”

“Yes,” said Ms. Amin. “I assumed that was the case when I saw you’d left them to me to handle.”

This was patently unfair; the proposals were being routed to each of them, and it was Ms. Amin’s turn to have a go at them. (Jack had pasted a sticky note to the top that said “all look good!” and the Healer had written “same here!” below it with her initials and a messy heart.)

“Are you,” said Remus, “does it, I wondered if you’ve got reporters and things following you yet, or.”

“Yet.”

“What?”

Ms. Amin looked up at him, her eyes narrowed. “Yet. I enjoy the implication that you’re on the edge of your seat waiting for me to get my fair share of harassment.”

“I didn’t—”

“Not being in receipt of a medal for valour,” she said, “and not, of course, having been a member of the just and righteous Order of the Phoenix, I’m fortunate to have escaped that particular honour for the time being. It sounds a terrible burden.”

Remus was so fucking tired. His leg hurt where he had healed it, and he felt as if his bones were slowly liquefying. “It was only a question.”

“Then if I could be permitted a moment of silence,” Ms. Amin said, biting off every word, “to finish the task that you’ve left me—”

“It’s all of our task,” said Remus, trying very hard not to snap at her.

Ms. Amin peeled off the sticky note with Jack’s and Trish’s scribbled comments on it and showed it to Remus. “Is it?”

“I—” With an effort, Remus refrained from swearing at her. Sirius would have. “I already looked through the proposals. I made a recommendation. I only wanted to know if you were finding the work more comprehensible than I did.”

Carefully, Ms. Amin pasted the sticky note back onto the front of the binder. Her shoulders slumped a little. “Yes,” she said, softly. “Yes, of course. I—I’m having a look, now. It’s—” Her lips folded in tightly for a moment. “It’s daunting.”

“It is,” Remus agreed.

“I’m not sleeping well,” said Ms. Amin.

He was surprised—not at the fact, but that she was willing to admit to him. “I’m not, either.”

Ms. Amin said, “Well.”

Not wanting to push the moment of amity past its natural limits, Remus settled down at his desk with the calendar for testimony and the lists the commission had compiled of areas that required special attention. He got an owl from Sirius ten minutes in.

_Tonks came by & says send an owl when you get a chance, she wants you to meet her girlfriend. Shd I send reply?_

“No reply,” said Remus to the owl. He was too tired to meet Tonks’s girlfriend. Tonks’s secret, illegal Muggle girlfriend—that was another thing he ought to find a way to deal with, and he didn’t have the energy for it. Tonks was like Sirius that way. She threw herself into things, and other people were left to clean up the mess.

There was probably precedent. Remus would look into it when he had a free moment. Find a solution. Tonks’s bright, teary, happy eyes haunted him rather. If only good people could have happiness as a birthright. Why hadn’t the world been arranged that way?

The second owl came thirty minutes later. _did you get my owl?_

“Oh, for—” Remus said aloud. “No reply. I’m _busy._ ”

As if he had nothing going on, he thought. As if he existed only when Sirius happened to think of him. He was dreading lunch with Molly. If it hadn’t been a wolf night it would have been all right.

Far, far too soon, the statement taker—Anna? Ariel?—came in to let them know that she was finished with Molly. That was how she said it: “I’m finished with Molly, now.”

“Is she all right?” said Remus.

It was Autumn, he remembered. She came from Barbados and had the smallest twinge of an accent. “She did very well,” Autumn said, which wasn’t an answer. “I let her know that I’d give her five minutes and then send you in.”

Remus nodded. “Thank you, Autumn.” He pulled a fresh piece of parchment close to him and started writing things down on it. Topics to discuss at lunch that would be harmless. Charlie (not dead, interesting job). Harry? (Risky, due to dangerous, Death Eater–adjacent job.) Proposed remodeling of drawing room (fine as long as he stayed away from why they were remodeling it). Misery of being a werewolf (distracting? too self-centered?).

He became aware that Ms. Amin was standing behind him. Turning, he raised an eyebrow at her.

“It’s five minutes,” she said, unembarrassed to have been caught snooping.

“Thank you.”

When he got up, Ms. Amin was still on her feet. She had one hand clenched into a fist and was grinding her knuckles into the open palm of her other hand.

“Are you all right?” Remus asked.

“I used to,” she said. “Before, when You-Know-Who was in power. I had to wait, sometimes for quite a long time, with the people who were going to be got out.”

It was the first time Remus had heard her speak about her own role in the war. If anyone else brought it up, she was quick to change the subject, as if her heroism and bravery were a slightly embarrassing teenaged crush that she now wanted to forget. “It must have been very frightening,” he said.

Ms. Amin shook her head impatiently, and her voice sharpened. “That wasn’t in the least what I meant. I had a big bag of Every Flavour Beans in my office. I shared them, when we were waiting. It’s something to talk about. There isn’t a witch or wizard in Britain who can’t speak for twenty minutes about Every Flavour beans.”

“Oh,” said Remus. “I—that’s a good idea.” He could think of Every Flavour Bean stories himself. James insisting that he had a system for telling the grass ones apart from the green apple. The four of them in the Gryffindor common room wagering homework on who could guess the contents of each bean.

Ms. Amin crossed the room to her desk and fished out a small bag of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. She tossed it to Remus and went back to her work without watching to see if he had caught it.

“Thank you,” he said. Ms. Amin didn’t acknowledge him.

He walked slowly back to the room where Molly was waiting, tossing the bag of jelly beans from one hand to the other. His head ached, and his joints were still sore. When his second paycheck came in (he had deposited his first one directly into Sirius’s bank account, not that he could ever pay back all that he’d taken from Sirius over the years), he was going to see if he could find Wolfsbane somewhere else. France, maybe.

To his ashamed relief, Molly was not crying when he came in. Her eyes were pink and puffy, but she smiled at him and called him _dear._ She took the bar of chocolate he offered her and teased him for making a fuss. They took the lift upstairs and walked down the road to the Ministry pub that Muggle eyes skated past. Remus ordered a ginger beer for himself and a cup of hot tea for Molly.

“But get something stronger if you want it,” he said.

Molly smiled again. Her smiles were visibly effortful, now. They hadn’t been when he first knew her, when it was only the Prewetts she had lost. He was desperately sorry for her; he resented her for needing comfort when he was so badly in need of it himself.

You could order potions from other countries, he thought. Owl mail. You could. He would look into it when he got home that night.

They talked about Tonks—Molly knew about Hannah, and said that she had never seen Tonks so happy. About Charlie, who was in Madagascar for work and kept sending photographs of the beasts in Madagascar, which existed nowhere else in the world. About the truth commission, and how important it was, and how proud Arthur would have been to see it come to fruition.

When the conversation lagged, and Remus was too tired to think of anything else to say, he fished out the bag of Every-Flavour Beans. Molly gave a genuine, surprised laugh and started telling him how when she was in labour with Bill, Arthur had found a bag of Every-Flavour Beans in the pocket of his robes.

“He kept pacing around the room at St. Mungo’s,” she said, laughing until tears came to her eyes, “and spitting out the bad ones—”

Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. Who knew.

* * *

If it was possible for every bone, joint, and muscle in a body to be separately painful at the same time, Remus’s had reached that state by the time he left the Ministry—later than he’d intended, earlier than Ms. Amin wanted him to go. His left knee had frozen up, and he was limping noticeably and contemplating whether it would be worth it to buy a cane. (Lucius Malfoy carried a cane, but he didn’t use it. Bastard.) His fingers were cramped, from holding a quill or from being a werewolf. And he Apparated directly into a reporter on the steps of Grimmauld Place, knocking them both over.

The reporter was back on her feet at once. She was young. Red hair. Hopeful. Remus couldn’t organize his bad knee to support him. He wanted Sirius, he wanted Sirius, he wanted Sirius. If he really cared about me he’d be here to help, Remus thought, bitterly and unfairly.

“Professor Lupin,” said the reporter brightly. “Can you confirm reports that—”

“I’m—” Remus couldn’t think of what to say, since it apparently wasn’t already obvious. “Please give me a moment to get back on my feet. I apologize for knocking into you. I wasn’t expecting anyone.” There. Nobody could take exception to that.

He scooted gracelessly a foot over and gripped the railing tightly, using it to pull himself up. The bad knee made a nasty, ominous creak. If he could only get inside. If he could have a cup of tea, and talk to Sirius.

“Excuse me,” he said to the reporter and tried to nudge past her.

Usually they got out of his way. This one didn’t. “Can you confirm reports that Sirius Black has declined to testify in the truth commission?”

“Please excuse me,” said Remus. “I’m trying to get into my house.”

“Professor Lupin, don’t you think the public has a right to know that one of the members of this so-called truth commission is being housed, fed, and—” She raised an eyebrow. “And so on—”

“If I could get into my house,” Remus said, reaching around her for the door handle.

She put her shoulder in his way. “And so on, by a notorious convicted murderer—”

“I am trying to—”

“—who refuses to testify before the commission, and incidentally that both of you happen to be the favoured pets of Albus Dumbledore’s Order of the—”

There was a roaring sound in his ears. “Albus Dumbledore never gave a damn about Sirius,” he said icily, “and he’d have watched us both die without blinking a fucking eye. Get out of my doorway.”

As he shoved his way into the house, and Mrs. Black began to scream, he caught the flash of triumph in the reporter’s eyes.


	4. Chapter 4

**Excerpted from Witness Testimony Archives for the Commission of Inquiry into the Wizarding Wars, 1978–1998**

**Statement Taker:** Delia Wakefield  
**Date:** 24 May 2000  
**Witness:** Dennis Creevey (age 17)

They wanted me to—I was only a fourth year, you know, I mean, I’d have been a fifth year if—and they said once we’d arrived that anyone my age should run away again. Only I knew Colin was staying—my brother, did I say?

Sorry. I’m sorry. If I could—

Thank you. I’m terribly sorry.

I nearly went. I nearly did go. I’d run into Anna—into, well, my best mate in Slytherin before everything that happened. She saw me in the Great Hall, and tried to get me to go with her. Said she’d hide me, even from her parents if she had to. Dunno what she thought I’d been doing all year, me and Colin, with the registration, but she did try to help.

Bit silly, looking back. Now that Dumbledore’s side won, Harry Potter’s side, seems as if it couldn’t have gone any other way. But I thought I would die. We’d been thinking all year that we were for it. Colin told me to go, he said Mum and Dad’d never forgive him if he got me killed. He had that bit right.

Only—they don’t look at me now. I should have, I didn’t know what would—I thought we were going to die anyway. I did, honestly. We talked about it, me and Colin, and we both thought we’d rather die fighting than running away, and—and there was Mum and Dad to think about, wasn’t there? If they caught us, Voldemort’s people, and—and tortured us, they’d always know where Mum and Dad were, and there was loads of talk, people saying that the Ministry wanted to find all the Muggles who’d had wizard kids and— I mean, that was the next thing they would think of, wasn’t it? First get rid of the Muggle-borns, and then.

So we thought if we were dead, then it might help? No more of the line. No reason for the Ministry to go after Mum and Dad.

It was stupid. It sounds stupid. I meant to—I didn’t think only my brother would die, that’s what I wanted to say. I thought we were going to lose. I thought all of us would be dead, at the end of it, one way or another.

* * *

Sirius chucked the newspaper at the back of Remus’s head, and caught it with his wand before it could hit the ground and scatter. “Prophet,” he said.

“Ugh.” Remus took a sip of tea. He liked their morning routine: eggs, and bread with jam, and tea, and sneering at the _Daily Prophet._ Sirius made the tea, and Remus the eggs. Some days they didn’t read the newspaper.

“You’re well famous, mate.”

“Tell me the damage.”

Sirius chuckled and unfolded the newspaper. If Remus had thought about it, he’d have remembered this from school, how funny Sirius always found it when Remus lost his temper. “Well,” he said, drawing out the L. “Werewolf activist Remus Lupin—you reckon that means an activist who’s also a werewolf, or an activist on behalf of—”

“Piss off.”

“Questioning your heroism, fucking typical. Rubbish about the commission.”

“What about the commission?”

Sirius scrunched his nose and mouth up as if he smelled something bad. “Just rubbish. Oh.” His voice was soft around the vowel.

“What,” said Remus.

“You—I didn’t know you’d said anything about me.” He emphasized _me,_ and Remus licked his lips and kept his eyes focused on his tea. “Who gives a damn anyway, what Dumbledore thought of me?”

“I do.” The words rang and rang, more significant than Remus had intended them. Sirius’s lips parted, and Remus added hastily, “He gave me a job, Sirius. When nobody else would—”

“He gave Harry up.” Sirius’s voice was steel.

They had already had this argument. Sometimes Remus thought they had already had every argument except the one that mattered. “I know.”

“He gave him up, and he’s all I have.”

It hurt to hear Sirius say that. It hurt more the oftener he heard it. “What else does the article say?”

“Quotes you.” Sirius licked jam off the heel of his hand. His mouth was an obscenity. Remus looked away. “Says the Minister should worry about getting stabbed in the back by the commission he thought was on his side.”

Remus rolled his eyes.

Sirius folded the paper up and tossed it at Remus again. He wasn’t quick enough to catch it, and it landed in the middle of his buttery, jammy toast. “Oi,” he said, mildly indignant.

“Slow.”

“Wanker.”

“Only when I’m thinking of you, beautiful Moony,” said Sirius.

When they were in school, Sirius had made those sorts of jokes a lot. They caught under Remus’s ribs and suppressed vital organ function. They put illicit, desperate thoughts in his head (the line of Sirius’s neck, the arch of his back, his fingers, his cold and elegant fingers).

 _Stop it,_ Remus ordered himself. He busied himself with cleaning up the mess Sirius had made, wiping jam off the paper, sorting out whether any of his toast could be saved. By the time he had finished, Sirius had stopped watching him. If you distracted Sirius for only a few minutes, he was distracted altogether.

They had kissed, once. In the Voldemort years. Sirius had kissed him. Even Tonks did not know that. Remus wondered if Sirius remembered, but he didn’t dare ask. It felt odd and precious to think that he might be the only person in the world who still carried the memory. If he was, he wondered if it still counted as real.

* * *

Though Remus hated traveling by Floo, he made an exception that morning, an attempt to dodge the reporters who were lurking outside Grimmauld Place. He’d thought of skipping work that day, but he couldn’t very well drop a bomb on the proceedings and leave the mess for the other commissioners to clean up. Jack might have done it, he thought not very charitably, but he was not going to. The staff had taken at least seven statements the previous day, which meant there was work to do.

When he got to the office, Jack and Ms. Amin were at their desks, Jack scribbling furiously and Ms. Amin was reading a thick sheaf of paper with great intentness, a quill pen caught between her middle and index fingers. Pomona’s desk had been tidied, but she was not at it. The Healer, of course, had not arrived yet. A bedraggled cupcake with a quill stuck into the top of it sat at her desk.

Ms. Amin twisted her head around when Remus came into their office, and to his slight shock, she smiled at him and said, “Good morning, then.”

Remus said, “Uh.”

“Disaster,” said Jack, approvingly, without looking up from what he was doing.

“I’m sorry,” Remus said. “I—I don’t have—” He wanted to say that it had been a long day yesterday, but Ms. Amin, at least, had had a day exactly like it. Longer, if anything. The only difference was that Remus was also a werewolf, but lycanthropy wasn’t an excuse that tended to elicit much sympathy.

“Why are you sorry?” Ms. Amin asked. “If you set aside how stupid you’d have to be to publicly criticize Albus Dumbledore, I think it was admirable.”

Remus laughed, as much a release of tension as because it was funny. “Well, thanks, I suppose, Ms. Amin.”

She tipped her chin up. “Layla is fine.”

“Is it fine?” said Jack from his corner.

“Not for you,” she said. “Go back to work.”

“Is it fine if I slag off Dumbledore to the _Prophet?_ ”

Ms. Amin, Layla, rolled her eyes. She liked Jack better than she pretended to, Remus thought, but then, she probably liked all of them more than she pretended to. She was a person who had become accustomed to protecting her heart. Remus knew it well enough to recognize it in someone else.

“If Pomona is correct,” said Layla, “I expect that Albus Dumbledore would have blinked several eyes—”

“Only had two,” Jack pointed out.

“If you or the other—are you working or eavesdropping?—members of the Order had died. Of course Pomona knew him better than I did.” Her tone suggested the possibility of brainwashing.

“You didn’t care for Albus,” Remus offered. To keep it from seeming like an argument, he busied himself about his desk, slinging his bag down from his shoulder and fishing through messages that had beaten him to the office.

Ms. Amin—Layla—sat down at her own desk, one hand closed into a fist that turned her knuckles pale. “I don’t care for the cultish devotion he seemed to inspire, shall we say. And for our purposes, here, I suspect that many witches and wizards will be relieved to see that the commission is free—relatively—of that influence.”

“I see,” said Remus.

 _Was_ he free of Albus’s influence? He wasn’t sure. Certainly the idea of seeing Albus again made him feel an idiotic, childish relief. At times in his life, he had resented Albus bitterly, and he did still, but there was nobody now to whom any of his burdens might be handed over. Nobody who could look at the vastness of an impossible task at hand and know at once what had to be done for it.

It was a disrupted kind of day. They got more owls that day than they had received any day previous—or any two days, or any week—all of which had to be gone through by one of the commissioners, as the statement-takers were all occupied. The Healer, Trish, had blithely volunteered to route the post, but she was stuck at St. Mungo’s, again, on some procedure that only she could manage.

“I’ll do it,” offered Pomona, on whom the most thankless tasks at Hogwarts—and now at the commission—had always seemed to devolve.

“It isn’t your job,” Layla said through her teeth.

That meant that it was Remus’s or Jack’s, and Jack had never yet volunteered for a job that he didn’t have to take on.

“They might wait another day,” Pomona suggested.

Layla’s furious eyes met Remus’s. He knew what she was going to say, so he said it for her. It wasn’t fair that only one of them should always have to be the killjoy. “We don’t want to be slow to answer,” he said. “Not if it’s in response to the _Prophet_ article.”

“It’s the first momentum we’ve had. The first chance—” Layla folded her lips inward and bit down on them. She cared about the truth commission. More than any of them, in Remus’s opinion, or at least she felt the least ambivalent about it. The fiercest in its defense.

Remus liked her for it. “I’ll do them,” he said.

“It isn’t your job either, Remus,” said Pomona.

“It’s nobody’s job. I don’t mind.” He scooped up the messy pile of letters and dumped them on his desk, on top of his batch of witness statements. The controlled mess felt soothingly manageable in a way that his witness statements hadn’t. _Albus Dumbledore was the greatest bulwark against evil in the last century,_ said one letter. (True.) _Albus Dumbledore endangered our children in service of an undisclosed battle plan that none of us consented to._ (True.)

But there were others besides that, letters that had nothing to do with Albus. A pureblood who had burned the wands of Muggle-born witches and wizards during the war, because the Death Eaters had threatened his daughter at Hogwarts. A woman who lost a leg in the seventies to a stray spell cast by an Order member, afraid all these years to speak about it. Crank letters swearing that Amos Diggory and his gang of toughs were roaming Hogsmeade, meting out bloody vengeance to those that were suspected of collaboration.

If Sirius were to give a statement, what would he say? That Albus Dumbledore’s testimony against him was enough to convict him in the eyes of the wizarding world. That the Ministry had never apologized for it. And what apology would be enough? Remus had apologized, but for the wrong thing. He had never said that he was sorry for abandoning Sirius to Azkaban, because he could not say aloud that he had abandoned Sirius to Azkaban.

He rubbed at his left knee, absently. That was the whole point of this, wasn’t it? To say the unsayable things.

Pomona touched his elbow. Remus jumped. He had not heard her approach. “I’m terribly sorry, Pomona, would you say that again?”

“I didn’t say anything,” said Pomona. “I only wanted to ask if you were all right. You looked very tired.”

“I’m always tired,” Remus said lightly.

Something in Pomona’s face shifted, and Remus thought that he had never seen anything sadder. She had taught him Herbology, once upon a time. How many students had come through her classroom, and died afterward, in the war? Remus had only taught for a year, and the faces of his dead students still haunted him: Colin Creevey, Cedric Diggory, Fred Weasley.

Pomona said, “I know that, Remus. I know you are.”

From his desk, Jack looked up. He had a reporter’s instinct for moments when things were not being said.

“What a bloody misery of a task,” Remus said.

“I’ll drink to that,” said Layla, who did not drink.

Remus had not felt so much like part of a team since he was seventeen years old. It was weighty and daunting, but nice.

* * *

That night was their dinner with Harry, and Remus was dreading what he would say about the _Prophet_ article. If Dumbledore had loved any of them, he had loved Harry, and Harry worshipped the old man. To make up for it, Remus made biryani and raita and naan from scratch, which both Harry and Sirius loved, and which Remus hardly ever found worth the trouble compared to store-bought.

Harry, when he arrived, looked more than usually exhausted. As Remus took his overcoat, he said, “Look, Harry, about the newspaper—”

“Wolf night?” Harry suggested.

Remus hesitated, because wolf night had not been the reason. “Albus wasn’t—perfect.”

“Damn near it,” said Harry, “all things considered. Wolf night?”

“Wolf night,” said Remus.

“There you are then.” Harry was visibly finished with the topic. “What have you made? I’m starved, we’re heading overseas this week and I’ve been miles too busy for anyone to think that I might want food.”

“Harry!” bellowed Sirius, charging down the stairs from his room, where he had been watching his Muggle black box. (He was addicted to it and perpetually badgered Remus to come to his room and watch the screen, too. Since Sirius’s room had exactly one place to sit, which was the bed, Remus politely declined.) “Remus has done naan!”

Harry laughed. “No need to shout,” he said, “I’m not having a go at him.”

Sirius laughed, too. Remus loved the sound of his laugh. His energy.

They scooped biryani and passed around the raita, and Sirius and Harry made appreciative noises over the naan, which was slightly burnt. “I like it burnt,” announced Sirius.

“I know,” said Remus. Then, “Heading overseas this week for what?”

Sirius and Harry both stopped eating. After an uncomfortable pause, Harry said, “What?”

James had been a terrible liar, too. “You said you were going overseas,” said Remus, not sure what he had stumbled into, what Black-and-Potter thing it was that he wasn’t supposed to know, but stubbornly unwilling, now, to let it go. “I only wondered what for.”

“Mate, you know he can’t say,” said Sirius around a mouthful of food.

Remus knew no such thing. They had talked perfectly freely about Harry’s work since he’d started it—the gruesome bits and the funny bits and the sad bits. None of it had ever been a secret, before—

Before the truth commission, he thought.

“If it’s something illegal,” he tried.

Harry laughed. “Would I? Of course it isn’t.”

“Don’t be tedious, Remus,” Sirius said.

The word was like a slap in the face. In school, it had been like that, and Remus was surprised at how raw he felt to have Sirius doing it again. _Tedious,_ he used to say in his posh-lad voice, and he would go off with James and have adventures to which Remus (tedious) was not invited.

Something of what Remus was feeling must have showed on his face, because Harry glanced at Sirius and said, “It’s—well, it’s nothing I can talk about. You know, at the moment. Sirius is only—you know. How he—you know how it is. And look, when it’s all sort of finished and squared away, then I—”

“Then you nothing,” said Sirius sharply. “You haven’t always got to spend your time telling everyone what a bloody hero you are.”

At times, without anything particular having changed in Harry’s face, Remus was very aware that Harry was an orphan. This was one of those times. Harry set down his fork.

“Harry, mate,” Remus said, “would you give me and Sirius a moment? Maybe go and have a look at all the rubbish Sirius’s bought for your practice room, yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Harry thinly, “yeah, okay.” He came close to knocking his chair on its back when he got up, but Remus caught it by the armrest and settled it back down onto the floor. The kitchen door slammed behind Harry. Like godfather, like godson.

Remus cast _Muffliato_ —wordlessly, because he knew that anything he could do right now was likely to make Sirius more angry, not less. He said, “You can’t talk like that to him.”

“Piss off,” said Sirius. He had an ugly look on his face, a twist to his mouth that Remus had always hated.

If they had been younger, Remus would have let it go. When they had been younger, he always had. “I mean it. You can’t—it isn’t fair. You’ll be sorry later but you’ll—you always do this. You always do this.”

“Oh, have I hurt your ickle feelings, poor little werewolf? Is that what you’re on about?”

 _Werewolf_ was fighting dirty, and Sirius knew it. Remus thought, _Just because your mother always—_

He wouldn’t say that. He wouldn’t. “You’ve made him feel like shite, for one thing.” He could hear the dropped r in _for_ and the softened vowel in _one,_ his bloody accent that slipped out when he most needed to sound in control of himself.

_Harry’s leaving, and it’s dangerous wherever he’s going, and what if he died and the last thing you ever said was this._

Remus couldn’t say that, either. “It’s not on to just—go and say the nastiest thing you can think of, and be sorry about it later. You’ve still said whatever it is. You’ve still been horrible to him, and he’s nineteen years old, Sirius, fuck’s sake, he’s not done anything wrong.”

Sirius’s stormy eyes met Remus’s, and Remus waited. Either Sirius would get angrier and say worse things and storm out, or else—

Sirius smiled at him.

“What?” said Remus.

“You’re very ferocious.”

“Don’t tease me.”

“I’m not. You’re all ruffled up and cross. I never see you get cross anymore.” Sirius tapped the tines of his fork against his teeth.

Against his will, Remus laughed. “Well, I see you get cross all the time, and you’re horrible when you’re cross.”

“I am, I’m dreadful,” Sirius agreed. If they had been younger, he’d have flung himself into Remus’s lap for a hug, or down onto his knees to beg forgiveness. Sirius was a tornado that dissipated as quickly as it had raged through. He never seemed to notice the wreckage he left in his wake. James and Peter used to stay angry with him, fights that went on for days and necessitated elaborate partitioning of their dormitory in Gryffindor Tower, but Remus never could. The moment Sirius touched him, or looked up at him with hopeful brown eyes, he relented.

Well, he was an adult now. (And Sirius hadn’t touched him.) “You can’t just say that,” Remus said sternly. “You’ve got to do better. At least with Harry you’ve got to, mate, he worships the ground you walk on.”

“All right, all right, I’ve got the point. No, look, I’m—I won’t, anymore. I’ll be a good godfather. Promise.” And Sirius bounded to his feet and dashed into the hall, shouting Harry’s name, before Remus could say anything else.

* * *

The next day was to be a long one, truth commission all day and then dinner with Tonks and Muggle Hannah in the evening. Remus went to work feeling irritated with Sirius for never leaving the house, and guilty about being irritated. What he needed, badly, was a night to himself: No wolf, no Harry, no Sirius. A quiet night.

Though he wouldn’t have said no to a quiet work day, either, the office that greeted him was more harried than Remus had ever seen it. Two of the statement-takers were occupying the desk that was normally Pomona’s, and Pomona was insisting resignedly that she didn’t in the least mind working in a separate office. Paper airplane memos were flying in too rapidly for the statement-takers to manage, which meant that a great pile of them was accumulating into a heap in Remus’s corner. Layla was overseeing the whole thing with her fingers dug into her hair and a look of abject horror on her face.

“Remus, thank heavens,” said Pomona. “Tell Layla I don’t in the least mind working down the hall.”

“I don’t in the least mind working down the hall,” said Remus, who genuinely didn’t. “What is all this?”

“This is the morning post,” said one of the statement-takers, a fair-haired boy called Cosmos. “They’ll be routing it in from the front desk. It should go off in a bit, they can’t have much more to send, and that’ll be all of it until the afternoon post.”

“Oh. But surely—” He addressed this to Layla. “Surely we can have the post redirected to a secondary office, Layla?”

“What reason on earth could you possibly have for asking me that question?” said Layla. “Have I been elected chief minister of this commission? Should I expect a corresponding pay rise?”

Remus had asked her because she was the most familiar of them all with Ministry procedure, but he could see that this explanation would not be received in good part. “Sorry,” he said. “Cosmos, please find whoever’s responsible for routing the post, and have them send the rest of it into 3B rather than to the main office.”

“It shouldn’t be much longer,” Cosmos said, very apologetically.

Layla nearly bared her teeth at him. “Did he ask you how much longer it would be?”

“No, miss,” said Cosmos, and disappeared sharpish.

“I’ll only be a minute,” said the other statement-taker, who was called Delia, holding up the hand that wasn’t scribbling. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry, really, it’ll just—be—done.” She sprung up with a handful of papers, chucked half of them at Layla—luckily they were bound together with a brightly-coloured clip—and dashed out of the office after Cosmos.

“When you decide to give an interview,” said Pomona.

Remus looked around, then realized she was addressing him. “I didn’t give an interview! I—this can’t all be because of that. I hardly said anything.”

“Nobody listens to me.” Layla was fastidiously tucking her hair back into place. “I said that it would benefit us, but nobody listens to a word I say.”

“Come again?” said Remus.

Layla opened her mouth to repeat it, saw the point of the joke, and laughed.

“Well, I must say,” said Pomona, nudging through the papers that had accumulated on her desk, “we have been rather foolish to assign all of our staff to take statements.”

“Nonsense,” said Layla briskly. “Given the available information, I think we made quite sensible decisions. And I’d miles rather have too much to do than not enough.”

The three of them gazed at the mountains of paper, daunted. They still had to go through the statements from the previous several days, to cordon out the information that each of them needed. They were still sorting through what everyone would be managing, but Muggles and non-humans had fallen to Remus nearly by default, and Pomona seemed disinclined to let anyone but herself collate information on sexual violence. Layla was doing what she called “Ministry mess,” which required not only witness statements but the meticulous combing-through of Ministry records going back a quarter century. The Healer, Trish, when she could be bothered coming in, was to be Significant Events (whatever that meant).

To everyone’s surprise, Jack had agreed to be the primary author on the final report. “It’ll have all of our names,” he said, “alphabetically, but we’ll need somebody, won’t we, to put the words down in the order that we want them.”

They had all stared at him, when he offered. Remus said, “It’ll be—quite a lot of work, I should think.”

“Don’t mind,” said Jack. “Working to deadlines, I’m used to it, aren’t I? Long as the lot of you will read it through afterward, and make sure there’s nothing important left out of it.” He laughed a little. “Well—there’ll have to be. Only with a newspaper, you’ve got to sort out the shape the story’s going to be and then carve away anything that doesn’t tell that story. With this—”

He waved a hand and didn’t finish the sentence. They all knew what he meant. With this, you perpetually ran the risk of carving away the most vital pieces.

Another load of envelopes flapped their way into the office and flumped down onto the mountain of paper. “Don’t look now,” said Remus, “but we may be bad at this.”

Layla made a small tut and returned to her work. Remus grabbed an armful of the stack of messages and carried them down the hall to 3B, the overflow office that everyone had decided was too grimly windowless for statement-taking. He went back for a second armful.

“Don’t lose anything,” said Layla, without looking up.

“I’m only going through for people who want to give statements,” Remus said, announcing it to the room as much as he was delineating the task for himself. “Everything that needs more than that goes in a separate stack, and we can worry about it later.”

“Very sensible,” Pomona said.

Remus carried his fresh armful back to 3B, sat down on the floor in the midst of the mess, and picked an envelope-airplane at random. _I don’t suppose the commission wishes to be bothered with a case like mine,_ it began pitifully. Remus decided that the back right corner of the room would be for people wanting to give statements, and the back left would be for “other.”

He got into a rhythm easily. It wasn’t necessary to read the letters in full, as he could tell almost immediately whether they required a response other than an appointment to make a statement. His work at the commission tended to be amorphous in terms of what was required from him, and it was soothing to have a discrete task for once.

_I work bank hours but could make myself available—_

_Hogsmeade shifts to summer schedule at the start of July, and it would be no trouble—_

Everyone said in their letters that what they had been through wasn’t so bad. They said it in blocky print and wavery cursive and misspelled words. _Of course I know that it doesn’t compare,_ they all wrote, as if the commission had specified a baseline level of required suffering, _but if it would be of use—_

They were rather magnificent, the letters. The witches and wizards of Britain. Remus found himself tearful over them: the parents who had lost children, the Muggle-borns who had been cast out or tortured as blood traitors, the Ministry officials who had tried to do right in years when there were no right choices on offer. _Nowhere near what other people went through,_ they wrote.

They wrote about the beacon of hope that Harry Potter had been, and Remus flinched a little to see Harry’s name like that. How angry it would have made Sirius.

 _It helped to know that there were people like Harry Potter out there fighting for us,_ said one note, in a rushed handwriting with uncrossed Ts.

Harry must be on his way overseas by now, to fight whatever his next battle was going to be, and there would always be a next battle. Harry was like James that way, and Lily, and Sirius—well. Sirius as he had been, before Azkaban.

 _I’d be dead now if it weren’t for Albus Dumbledore,_ said letter after letter, and Remus thought that Layla was not right, or not quite right, about the Order of the Phoenix. Dumbledore had thrown away Harry, and he had thrown away Sirius, and Snape who all these years on was still the only person who had ever made Wolfsbane for Remus. Was it forgivable, then, as long as Dumbledore also saved these others, witches and wizards who survived to send letters by owl post? As long as Harry, impossibly, had survived?

* * *

Although he felt shy Apparating directly into Grimmauld Place—Sirius had never said, “Live here forever,” and Remus still felt like a guest—Remus decided that he was not going to risk another doorstep revelation. Reporters from the _Prophet_ were still lurking around with ever more eager looks on their faces. He supposed it was good copy to have someone in power slagging off Dumbledore. Made a nice break from Rita Skeeter.

He would have loved to name her in their report: Rita Skeeter, the woman who told you all that Harry Potter was mad and dangerous. But thanks to Hermione Granger, Skeeter had been silent for most of that bleak last year of Fudge’s command of the Ministry. She would be remembered as a truth-teller, for her interview in the _Quibbler._ Remus thought that Hermione Granger must find that maddening.

The house was ominously still. “Sirius?” Remus called. Crossing into the kitchen, he found the refrigerator door hanging open, a plate of food half-eaten. It chilled him ice-cold. He reminded himself that Voldemort was gone, and the world was quiet again. People he loved would not be snatched away from their dinners, tortured, murdered.

He called Sirius’s name again.

If the Dark Mark stood over the house, he wouldn’t have seen it. He had Apparated into the foyer.

Remus’s hands were shaking. Voldemort was dead. There were no more Dark Marks to be cast into the sky. He made himself walk, not run, to the stairs and up to Sirius’s bedroom. He pressed his ear to the door, listening for the sounds of the absurd black box Sirius loved so much. Nothing. Nothing. Sirius wasn’t dead, Sirius was alive, it was fine, it was all right.

Drawing in a shaky breath, Remus knocked at the bedroom door. There was no reply. He said, “Sirius? You all right, mate?” When there was still no reply, he went in.

The room smelled like dog. The thin black box was wedged messily between papers and candles and quills on the top of Sirius’s bookshelf; pictures flashed across it silently like photographs. Sirius was curled up (human) in a tight ball at the center of his bed. He did not look up when Remus came in.

“Pads,” Remus said.

Nothing.

Merlin, was this what Sirius did when it was a bad day? When he was alone in his room? Curled up like this, in the house he had hated, his eyes bright and unblinking, for hours at a time? It made Remus’s stomach hurt to think about. He stepped over newspapers and discarded trousers to kneel on the bed beside Sirius.

“Oh hullo,” said Sirius. His voice sounded fine. Normal.

Remus said, carefully, “You all right?”

Sirius didn’t answer. Slowly, he curled himself a little more so that his forehead bumped against Remus’s knees. Remus touched his hair. He did it very lightly. Not the way he wanted to touch. Just enough that Sirius would know he was there, enough for comfort. His fingers soft against the strands of Sirius’s hair, smoothing it back from his face.

“Can I ask something.”

Remus’s stomach jumped. “Yes,” he said.

“You didn’t.” Sirius wet his lips. “When I.”

Oh, God, it was now. It was now, and no matter how many times he had practiced in his mind, he wasn’t ready. He waited.

“When I was in there. In Azkaban. You didn’t—I never saw you again.”

“Until after,” Remus pointed out.

Sirius flinched. Remus felt it in the nudge of Sirius’s forehead against his knees. “But you’ve never said,” Sirius said, “it was twelve years and you never—”

“They wouldn’t—” To Remus’s surprise, to his horror, he was near tears. _Sir, I have to see him._ God, how young he had been. “They wouldn’t let me. There was still—maybe the werewolf thing, I dunno. They, they wouldn’t let me.”

Sirius said, “No, but look, twelve years is—”

“I know how long it was!”

Sirius flinched again. Remus hated himself. He said, “They wouldn’t let me.”

Was it better to lie? Remus had imagined this conversation a hundred times, a hundred hundred, and he still didn’t know. Dumbledore had said, exactly (Remus could still see his face as he said it), _I think it would be inadvisable, Mr. Lupin, in the current political atmosphere._ He had said, _The best thing to do would be to put it behind you and get on with living the rest of your life._

Remus remembered the sticky feeling of shame that had come over him. What Dumbledore must think of him, for asking, for loving a traitor.

If he had pushed harder, could he have gotten permission to see Sirius, after all? What if he had for once, for bloody once, cared more about what was right than what other people saw when they looked at him? He could have said, _I don’t care about advisable, I have to see him._ And then Sirius would never have to know, _know_ that Remus had abandoned his best friend as soon as he was given the opportunity to do so. Someone he claimed to love.

(Lily was dead, James was dead, Peter was dead. All those Muggles. He had thought Sirius a murderer ten times over. But if he had pressed Dumbledore, and gone to Azkaban, Sirius would have said _Moony I didn’t do this,_ and then what, then what, then bloody what?

It tortured him that he didn’t know the answer.)

Sirius wouldn’t have left him that way, not for anything. It wasn’t in Sirius to walk away from a fight. In the old days, the Voldemort days, when he would come back from missions with James, it would be as if someone had sharpened his edges and brightened his colours. He was made for this, fighting, charging into battle. All the lights inside of him came on, blinding, dazzling.

Sirius had kissed him on a night like that, after a mission. It had lasted a few heart-stopping seconds, and then James had come home and Sirius had catapulted off of Remus without another word and dashed off to meet him. And Remus had stayed put, shaking and hard, while Sirius and James laughed in the kitchen.

 _At me,_ Remus had thought, even though he knew it wasn’t. _At me, for wanting him._ Somehow, that would have hurt less than admitting that Sirius was putting on a show for James, a command performance of a soldier exhilarated from his mission, who had never thought of kissing his best friend.

James was Sirius’s best friend, anyway. Not Remus. It didn’t matter.

And that had been part of it, too, hadn’t it? Part of accepting _inadvisable._ It hadn’t been so terribly long afterward that Remus got word of James and Lily’s deaths, and he wondered—of course he wondered—if the kiss had been part of a plan. A traitor’s plan to keep Remus from seeing what, for all he knew, had been right in front of his face all along.

Even now, these long years after, the bright, vivid shame and the throb of desire mixed together and hit him like a physical pain. He took his hand away from Sirius’s hair and pressed it hard against his heart.

“I’m sorry,” Sirius said.

The sound of his voice jolted Remus back to the present. “Don’t be. For what?”

“For being, being like this. Bloody—when Harry’s off—fuck. _Fuck._ ”

Of course, it was Harry. The mission, overseas, too dangerous or too mad or too illegal for Remus to know about. He said, “He’ll be all right,” with as much conviction as he could muster. “He’s survived everything else they’ve ever thrown at him.”

“No,” said Sirius, tilting his head so that the words got muffled against Remus’s knees, “he hasn’t.”

And that was everything, wasn’t it? James and Lily’s son, that beautiful boy who hissed S sounds to mean Sirius months before he said his first real word, had died alone in the Forbidden Forest, under Voldemort’s cold, inhuman eyes; and Sirius had not been there to save him. To die with him. To die _for_ him, to die _first,_ in battle, protecting the people he loved.

“No,” he said, because he had to say something. “But that was his choice. Voldemort didn’t beat him. He’ll be all right.”

The one of Sirius’s dark eyes that was visible caught Remus’s. “Do you promise,” he said, sounding very young.

With a sigh, Remus tilted his head back. Sirius nuzzled, as if he were his dog self; it made Remus’s heart skip a beat, although he knew that Sirius was only seeking comfort. Wolf night was not far enough away. He craved touch like oxygen. Sirius’s touch. God.

“Moony.”

“Yes, I promise,” said Remus, reckless. “I promise you.”

If Harry died again, then Sirius—

Remus couldn’t think about what Sirius would do, if Harry died again.

* * *

Eventually, because he had to, he pulled a blanket over Sirius and left him behind. “I’ll be back before eleven,” he promised. Sirius didn’t answer.

They were meeting at a Muggle restaurant in a part of London that Remus didn’t know, a place called Kokeb with a dark red door and awning and fair-coloured wood tables inside. Tonks was sitting at one of them, animatedly chattering to a woman with nearly-white hair, whose back was to Remus. With a nervous check that his Muggle shirt was buttoned properly, he waved at Tonks.

“There he is!” Tonks said loudly, and her companion turned around with a bright, expectant smile. “Hannah, this is my absolutely favourite friend, Remus, and Remus—oh come _on,_ you aren’t that old, Remus, have my chair, I’ve got to run to the loo anyway. Remus, this is Hannah.”

Muggle Hannah had streaks of blue and pink in her bleach-blonde hair. She was wearing a tight skirt and a button-up shirt and a cardigan, as if somebody had challenged her to look as much like the cliché of a librarian as possible. When she stretched out her hand to shake Remus’s, as Tonks dashed off, he saw a tattoo and a criss-cross thatch of scars on the inside of her wrist.

Muggle Hannah caught him looking, and a flash of unease crossed her face.

“I’ve been a werewolf since I was five,” said Remus, as if that explained something.

Perhaps it did. Hannah’s face relaxed, and she said, in a voice unexpectedly deep, “Yes, Dora told me.”

_Dora._

“Are you going to break her heart?” Remus asked, after a moment’s uncomfortable silence.

“Is she going to break mine,” said Hannah. She did not sound like she was asking a question; she sounded resigned to knowing the answer. Oh how Remus recognized the sound of her voice.

“I’ve never seen her like this about anyone. Honestly.”

A twisty, delighted smile overtook Hannah’s face. “Well then. Well. Then I suppose that puts paid to both our questions.”

He wasn’t so sure that it did, but Tonks came back then, a whirlwind of energy and nerves, and took charge of the conversation. Did Remus know that Hannah was from the West Midlands. Was she? _Not_ Birmingham; Kidderminster, did he know it? No, that was all right, people never knew anything in Worcestershire outside the cathedral city.

Remus liked Hannah tremendously and immediately, and he could see that she was wild about Tonks. Anyone could see it from the way she watched Tonks talk, always smiling or close to it, and ready at any moment to laugh.

“What sort of a librarian are you?” he asked.

The waitress came then, to take their orders. Remus snatched at the menu and peered inside it, to very little enlightenment. Hannah smiled kindly. “If you’d like I can order for us? And we can all share.”

“Please,” said Remus.

“Yes, do,” said Tonks.

Hannah ordered rapidly and confidently, tibs this and lamb that. Remus never ate lamb, because eating lambs was what wolves did, but it was a silly rule that he had made for himself when he was seven. He could make an exception for the person Tonks loved.

“And a bottle of honey wine, I thought?” Hannah suggested. “Remus, do you drink?”

“Firewhiskey,” said Remus, “usually. I could try something new.”

“And a bottle of honey wine, and that’s all,” said Hannah to the server, handing over their menus. “You’re very kind.”

“Thanks for that.” Remus undid the paper seal on his utensils and spread the napkin over his lap. “You were going to tell me what sort of librarian you are.”

Tonks said, “The best kind!”

Hannah giggled into the tattoo of a semicolon on her wrist. “You cannot say that to people you’re introducing me to, it raises expectations that are absolutely unmerited by the actual job that I possess.”

“Posh girl,” said Tonks fondly.

Anxious that Hannah not be made to feel defensive of what was quite a posh accent and probably not her native one, Remus said, “What’s the best kind of librarian then?”

“Well, I would say my kind, wouldn’t I? I was a research librarian, mostly archival stuff, but now I’ve—”

“She’s brilliant at it,” Tonks put in.

“—moved on to—stop it, Dora—data management consulting? Which is only sort of going round to different libraries in the country and telling them the ways they’re doing everything wrong.”

“Which she is good at,” said Tonks.

“Oh,” Remus teased, “have you sat in on her meetings?”

Tonks lit up. “No! But maybe—”

“Oh my God.” Hannah put her head into her hands. “Don’t give her ideas, Remus!”

“I have loads of ideas on my own,” said Tonks brightly.

“Horrible ones,” Remus said. “Terrifying ones.”

“What if I looked like someone else? Not your sexy witch girlfriend but like—a properly important suit person who needs to know about Data.” Tonks glanced around, obviously concluded that the restaurant was too crowded to change her face, and leaned instead heavily against Hannah’s shoulder. “Pleeeeeeeease please please please?”

Hannah smiled as if she were fighting a losing battle against smiling. “Get off me, sweets, you’re heavy, and we’re being dreadful to your friend.”

She didn’t intend to set him on the outside, Remus didn’t think, but _your friend_ reminded him that he was the other one. “I’m sorry my roommate couldn’t make it,” he said, and wished he hadn’t: It was too obviously insisting on his own importance to someone, if not to the unit of Hannah and Tonks.

“That’s Dora’s cousin, isn’t it?” Hannah asked. “The one—oof.”

This was because Tonks had kicked her ankle under the table. Hannah flicked anxious eyes up to Remus’s face and turned her attention to her napkin.

The one I betrayed, yes, Remus thought. He knew that wasn’t what she had started to say, but he felt suddenly spotlighted by it, sick with it. He could have gotten Sirius out of Azkaban (no he couldn’t) if he’d only trusted him ( _how_ could he?) but he hadn’t and he didn’t and Sirius—

Hannah reached across the table and closed one long-fingered hand tight around Remus’s wrist. “He’s safe _now,_ ” she said.

The look on Tonks’s face, watching Hannah. God.

Remus nodded, his breath steadying. He owed them some kind of explanation. “He—it was a bad day, today.”

“For you?” said Hannah, letting go his wrist. Her voice was richer, somehow, than it had been when she was talking to Tonks. Steady. Remus felt desperately grateful to her.

“For him. Our—his godson, Harry, I don’t know if Tonks has—”

“He’s the one who defeated You-Know-Who,” Tonks explained.

If Harry had been there, he would have corrected her, so Remus did it for him. “One of the people who defeated You-Know-Who.”

“Oh,” said Hannah, respectfully.

Remus had a mad urge to laugh. How ridiculous it must all sound to her. “He,” he went on, “well, Sirius feels responsible. I mean, he is responsible, in a—we both feel responsible to Harry’s parents, to look out for him but Sirius, in particular—”

“He’s got a rather dangerous job, does Harry,” said Tonks.

(Did Hannah know that Tonks had the same job?) “So Sirius is worried, and it’s—so, it’s a bad day. And he’s not leaving the house, and he hates the house, so of course I worry. That’s—he isn’t a secret, or anything. You don’t have to kick her.”

“She didn’t kick me!” said Hannah, with a face sufficiently innocent that Remus would have believed her, if he hadn’t known Tonks.

“I did kick her,” said Tonks.

Their food arrived then, saving Remus the trouble of figuring out how to steer them back into safe waters. It came on an enormous tray of flat, spongy bread on which different-coloured stewy splodges of food had been symmetrically plopped. Remus could not begin to imagine how they were supposed to eat it.

“Could we get a bit more injera, as well, please?” Hannah said to the waitress. She handed Remus a folded-up piece of spongy breadstuff. “Have you done this before?”

“No he hasn’t,” said Tonks, for him. “We haven’t either of us. You show us, love.”

Hannah showed them how to rip away a piece of bread and use it to scoop the food. The scoop Remus tried first, which was some sort of spinachy thing, was absurdly good. He told Hannah so, and she gave him her twisty, delighted smile. God, it would hurt Tonks to lose her, and it would hurt Hannah to be lost. They should never have started this. Tonks should have known better.

“D’you know what I wonder,” said Hannah, after a few minutes of contented, silent munching.

“Hm?” Tonks said with her mouth full.

“Well, you said that your person—”

“Sirius.” An illicit thrill went through Remus, to hear Sirius called his person.

“You said that Sirius doesn’t like to leave the house, and he hates the house, so I only wondered if there was a way—Well. I don’t know what you lot can do, but Dora’s let me have a look inside her handbag and I know that space doesn’t work the same for you. Couldn’t you make a place that’s not leaving the house, but isn’t the house?”

Tonks choked on her food with the force of her enthusiasm. Remus thwapped her on the back while she coughed. “Tents!” she choked out, reaching for her water (Hannah put the glass in her hand). “You could put in a tent!”

Remus laughed, and they let the subject drop. But he remembered it later, when he was back home, lying wide awake in his bed and trying to think of anything but Sirius. Not a tent. Sirius had told him that he used to hide in the bottom cabinet of his mum’s armoire. Suppose he put an Undetectable Extension Charm in it, expanded the space upward, so that you put your arms and shoulders into it and pulled yourself up into the new room. Sirius would like the way it turned gravity sideways, and he would like it that Remus had done an illegal charm for him. The tricky bit would be the size. Remus would have to measure, and make sure that the cabinet door was wide enough for Sirius to climb in through.

He tried to picture both, the cabinet door and Sirius’s shoulders, and shivered.

He’d not been laid in a while. One day soon he would go to a bar, or dancing, and see what came of it. The idea was—unsatisfying, somehow, a function of spending an evening with two people who so plainly adored each other. But he wanted, at least, to be touched, the feel of someone else’s hands on his skin. Fingers along his collarbone where it showed above his shirt, a leg tucked between his as he slept. He wanted, and wanted, and wanted.


	5. Chapter 5

**Excerpted from Witness Testimony Archives for the Commission of Inquiry into the Wizarding Wars, 1978–1998**

**Statement Taker:** Ernie McMillan  
 **Date:** 5 June 2000  
 **Witness:** Cornelius Fudge, formerly Minister of Magic (1990–1996) (age 56)

A great deal of exaggeration has found its way into the record, I believe, and particularly with regards to my own tenure as Minister of Magic. You needn’t suppose that I’m angry about it. Last thing I am. Very frightening time, that. Hear of it now, you’d suppose the rest of the wizarding world had rallied behind Dumbledore and Potter like—like—well, like they certainly didn’t. You say ‘Oh, Minister Fudge, he’s to blame for everything.’ But—

No, well, I didn’t mean you, my boy. Hufflepuffs—

Not here to blame anyone, eh? You needn’t try that on me. In any Ministry, back as far as there’s been a Ministry, everyone’s always got to find someone to blame. My last year, everyone rushed to blame that boy Potter, convenient enough target. Now it’s me. And I don’t mean to say that either one of us was innocent. Bit funny, that boy, always was. Too polite one moment, uncontrollable the next. And me, well. I made mistakes, too. I’m the first to say so. The very first to say so, and you can write that down and print it anywhere you like. _Discredited Minister Cornelius Fudge says outright,_ and so on. I should hope that it will be remembered that I did my best.

I did what I thought best in a very dark time, and that’s all any of us can say.

* * *

Molly fire-called Remus to talk about Harry.

In fact, she fire-called Sirius, which was even more surprising, but Sirius was not available.

(Sirius had said, “I’m going to have a bit of a lie-down” and gone into his room and shut the door. Five minutes later Remus had found himself outside of that door, not quite with his ear pressed to it, but hoping at least to hear something that would reassure him that Sirius was all right. Remus stood there a long time, debating the wisdom of knocking on that door, remembering that Sirius had said he didn’t want to be hovered over. He would give up anything he had in his life, if it meant he could be to Sirius a person whose presence was assured, assumed. If he could say “You all right?” and have Sirius answer, “Come in,” just like that. It hurt to want.)

“Napping,” he explained, to Molly.

“Oh, I see,” said Molly. She had the face of a woman who was wringing her hands where Remus could not see them.

“Anything I can help with?”

“No, well—” Molly caught Remus’s eye, and managed a small, self-deprecating laugh. “Well. I would have said I was calling to know if he’d heard from Harry, but the truth is I’m fretting about him, and I wanted to talk to someone else who might be fretting, too.”

Remus smiled. “Sirius is sleeping, but I can tell you he _is_ fretting. He’s been in a foul mood.”

“Has he?” said Molly, a little desperately.

“Well,” Remus said. “You know. Harry’s all he has.”

Molly’s face was—God, unbearably knowing. But she didn’t challenge him. She said, “I know that he’s important to you too,” and it took a long moment for Remus to understand that she meant Harry.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I don’t—like to see him run risks. I feel I ought to be doing more to protect him. Doing anything to protect him, really.”

“He wouldn’t thank us,” said Molly.

“No,” Remus agreed, “no, but—I think of Lily.”

Two tears went down Molly’s cheeks, one of them catching in a wrinkle, the other dripping off the tip of her chin. “Do you know what I think of, sometimes?”

“What?”

“It’s horrible,” said Molly, softly.

Can’t be more horrible than the things I think, Remus thought. “Tell me.”

Molly was properly crying now, pressing the back of one wrist to her nose. “I’m _jealous_ of her. Can you imagine that. Jealous of a dead woman. But I think, at least she had the chance. Harry and Ron are— I don’t even know where they are! Wherever it is, I’m not there with them. My boys.”

Remus thought of Sirius, shut up in his room; of Harry, overseas somewhere mysterious, doing something dangerous to make the world safer. “I always thought ‘they also serve who only stand and wait’ was a load of bollocks,” he said.

Molly spluttered a laugh. “Who said that?”

“A Muggle,” said Remus. “Poet.” Sirius would have called him a swot for knowing it.

“Though I suppose that is what I’ve done,” said Molly.

“Oh, Mol.”

“Well.” Her eyes had gone a bit red.

“You’ve done more than—” Remus was surprised to find himself angry for her. “Half the wizarding world didn’t do as much as you have to get rid of Vol—of You-Know-Who. All I meant was that it’s bloody hell to be the—to know other people are out doing things and you’re stuck at home waiting to hear that they’re all right.” He paused. “And I don’t think for a second that anything’s happened to Harry.”

He did think it for a second. With Sirius storming around the house, thinking it very noisily indeed, it was impossible not to think it, at least a bit.

“Oh, I suppose you’re right.” Molly gave a final sort of sigh. “Only—I wish I could do more for them. All my children. I wish I could—” She shook her head and said again, softly, “—do more. For them.”

He remembered her weeping in the Great Hall, after the battle was over. Fred’s body very still under her hands, Fred Weasley who had never been still in life. The Battle of Hogwarts had been a blur, but Remus remembered that.

“Well,” Molly said, trying for briskness. “Don’t let me keep you, Remus, dear. Give my best to Sirius, and—and if you hear anything—”

“I’ll send an owl if I do,” Remus promised.

Molly’s head disappeared with a pop, and Remus stayed where he was, sat uncomfortably in front of the fireplace, staring into the flames and remembering.

* * *

As the commission ticked on, Remus was glad that he had Sirius’s secret room to think of. When it all got to be too much, he could take himself away for a time, to the pub or farther away still, into Muggle London, and write notes on what he wanted to buy. Having money was astonishing. When he thought of something to buy, he could buy it, and still he was nowhere near spending his salary every month. He could go to his vault in Gringotts without feeling the familiar, exhausting swoop in his stomach that came from knowing he was near the end of his resources. Some days, making lists of what to buy for Sirius’s secret room was the only bright spot in his day.

They were deep into it now. Kingsley had given a statement to the _Prophet_ to say that testimony given to the commission of inquiry could not be used as evidence in any trial that might arise in future, unless the specific permission of the witness had been granted. Another fresh wave of letters came in after that, and nobody now was complaining about the inadequacy of the commission’s witness list.

In its own way, that was exhilarating too: the knowledge that their work would matter. It helped a little—though not enough—when they were sitting in on witness interviews; or buying pints for the statement-takers when the work day was finished. A boy called Neil, fresh from Hogwarts, had given the job up in the second month, but the rest of them seemed hardy as planks.

“If anything they’re managing better than we are,” said Layla, which meant better than she was. She never liked to admit that the work was wearing on her.

“Better than me, absolutely,” said the Healer, who had happened to be in the office then. Remus stopped himself from saying that she had less to manage as the rest of them, spending two-thirds of her time at St. Mungo’s anyway.

“Kids,” remarked Jack. “Made of rubber, they are, everything bounces off ‘em.”

Pomona shot him a look and said in a voice that was, for her, very critical indeed, “They feel it very much, and I shouldn’t like it said that they don’t. They’re managing beautifully.”

“All right, all right,” said Jack cheerfully.

Remus was managing almost exclusively by putting his mind to work on Sirius’s surprise any time the commission’s business got close to overwhelming him. After it was done, he thought that he would have to set himself to another project. Maybe finding Wolfsbane. His early forays in that direction had not been encouraging. Wolfsbane was not permitted over international borders except in special circumstances, and the nearest Remus had been able to find anyone willing to sell it was Belgium.

On the other hand, he had found a sofa at a Muggle secondhand shop that was nearly identical to the one the Marauders had considered their own in the Gryffindor common room, years ago. He was having it cleaned now, and it made him happy to think about Sirius comfortably installed on it, watching his Muggle telly and spilling brown sauce everywhere.

For the time being, he was keeping the Undetectable Extension Charm in his own bedroom, stuffing it into a pocket of the winter coat he would not need again until October. He liked apparating into it and rearranging the bits and bobs he had collected. The shabby old table, purchased at an Oxfam furniture shop in Nottingham that Tonks had told him about. The sofa, and the pile of blankets to keep Sirius’s always-cold hands warm. The fireplace, whose exact positioning in the room he had not yet decided on.

Sirius would be warm there, and safe.

He was daydreaming when one of the statement-takers knocked two knuckles against the door frame of the spare office and said, “They’re asking for you on level three.”

“For me?” said Remus. “What’s on level three?”

The statement-taker smiled at him and shook her head to indicate that she didn’t have any more information than she had already given him. “Sorry, that’s all they’ve said. Someone’s going to come collect you?”

As he walked to the lifts, Remus tried to run through in his mind which offices were housed on level three. He was sure that Magical Law Enforcement was on two—he remembered it, hell _hell,_ from Sirius’s, _don’t,_ so that meant it couldn’t be Magical Law Enforcement, which meant it couldn’t be anything to do with the Undetectable Extension Charm he wasn’t supposed to have cast.

Level three turned out to be Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. A somber-faced witch whose first name was, he thought, Emmanuelle, came to meet him at the lift. She spoke in a deferential way that made Remus want to laugh and tell her to come off it. “I’m terribly sorry for pulling you away from your work, Commissioner Lupin, but we brought in a Muggle for Obliviation, and she gave us your name. We didn’t like to—well, she did say that she—”

They rounded a corner, and Remus stopped dead. On the floor between two largeish Obliviators, her knees drawn up to her chin, crying hopelessly, was Muggle Hannah.

“Hannah,” he said.

Hannah didn’t look up. She was heaving enormous, wet gasps of sobs into her elbows.

Remus took two steps closer to the two wizards who were guarding her. He tried to make his voice sound the way James used to, that absolute sureness that came from being wealthy and lucky and handsome. “Would you mind telling me what you call this? Does the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad make it a habit to detain Muggle women? Can’t you see she’s frightened out of her mind?”

He knew that he had to think quickly, or Tonks— He couldn’t think of Tonks. If he thought of Tonks he wouldn’t be able to think of what to do. Had Hannah told them that she knew Tonks? She couldn’t have, or else why would they have sent for him and not for Tonks?

“I told them,” wept Hannah. “I told them, I told them, I told them you’d asked me to consult on data management, but they didn’t, they didn’t—” The rest of her words were lost.

Well, it was a better lie than anything Remus had come up with. “Would you mind,” said Remus to the Obliviators, very cold, “telling me what’s going on?”

“She, er,” said one of them.

The other one licked his lips and made an effort. “She, the Muggle, that is, she witnessed a, she was standing outside the Ministry entrance—on the Muggle side, you see—when we come up, and it, it oughtn’t have been a lift, you see. So we was called up—”

“I’m a fucking employee!” Hannah said, shrill. She flicked her eyes up to Remus, a heartbeat of a moment, and then resumed crying.

People always underestimated Tonks, too. “Let me try to calm her down a little, all right? You’ve frightened her, and there’s clearly been a mistake. I’ll take her down to the commission offices and we’ll sort this out.”

_Calm her down_ were the right words, and the Obliviators—both looking deeply uncomfortable and glad to be relieved of the burden of responsibility—got out of the way. Gently, signaling the motions before he made them, Remus knelt, put an arm around Hannah, and stood them both up. She turned her face into his shoulder and kept crying. Clever.

When they reached the spare office, the one with all the extra mail, and Remus was able to switch on the lights and throw the door lock, Hannah shoved away from him and said, “What the bloody _fuck_ gives you people the right to pull me off the _fucking street_ to—”

“Shhhhh,” Remus said, gesturing at the door. “It’s not a sound barrier. For heaven’s sake.”

Hannah was wiping tears from her face with practiced impatience. “Can you get a message to Dora? I don’t want her to worry if she hears, or do anything stupid.”

“You can make yourself cry?” said Remus. He was very tired, and his mind hadn’t quite kept up with whatever was happening.

“No,” Hannah snapped. “I can _actually_ cry, when strangers with magic powers pull me off the street and scare me to bloody death. Are you going to tell them that I’m working for you?”

Remus stared at her blankly. “I just have.”

“Yes, but are you going to—Remus!” Hannah snapped her fingers in front of his nose, and he jolted. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t want Tonks to,” he said, “I don’t want—”

Sometimes he felt, nauseatingly, that he was residing in a completely different location than inside his own body. He knew that he must stop floating and faffing about, but he could not remember how to do it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m not quite— You might have told them you were here for the truth commission. You lost your mother, didn’t you? To Voldemort? They aren’t to know that we haven’t invited Muggles in to speak to us.”

“I’m not having those memories back.” Hannah’s chin was up, and her tone suggested that she expected Remus to put up a fight. “And anyway they’d only have wiped my memories again once I was finished. Dora can meet me now, officially. You’ll have to arrange it.”

Remus had never felt quite so stupid. “But I haven’t hired you.”

“Why are you being like this!” Hannah said, her voice rising. “I’ve _said,_ you’ll have to tell them I’m working for you. Stop being so useless and help me, I can’t, I don’t know anything about your bloody wizarding world and I need you to _help._ ”

She was, after all, very young. Ten years younger than Remus, easily. If Tonks lost her, she would— “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am tremendously sorry. It’s not my—I’m not usually this stupid. I’ll help you, I’m still—working through things, a bit.”

Hannah softened. “I did throw this at you. A bit.”

“Happy to help,” said Remus. He liked the feeling of gallantry, the possibility of minor heroism. “You see, it’s been—something of a week. I’m not at my best.”

“No,” said Hannah, with the twisty smile that had made Remus like her. “I’m not, either. Clearly. They scared me to bloody death. I don’t like to be grabbed.” The fingers of her right hand were closed over her left wrist, tight enough to whiten her knuckles.

Emmanuelle, the witch who had been overseeing the whole thing, had spoken respectfully to Remus. He hadn’t thought much about Ministry officials and their ideas about the commission. It had crossed his mind that people might come to respect _it,_ but never that they would find it necessary also to respect _him._

“I’ll speak to them,” he said. “They shouldn’t have been rough. It was a disgraceful way to behave.”

“Oh,” said Hannah, surprised. “I didn’t—thank you. I didn’t mean that. Only, now that it’s happened, I don’t want to—” Her voice cracked.

Remembering how Hannah had reached across the table to him at the Ethiopian restaurant, Remus held out his hands, palm up. Hannah drew in a quivering breath and took them, squeezing very tight. He said, “I don’t know what I can promise, what they’ll agree to. But I won’t let anyone touch you, and I’ll do everything I can to make sure that you aren’t Obliviated. I don’t know that we need any data management—”

“Hah,” said Hannah.

“No, I mean, we’re managing.”

Hannah withdrew her hands and cast a meaning glance over the office, which was still strewn with papers stacked on various chairs in various states of tidiness.

“Oh, well,” said Remus. “That isn’t _data,_ it’s only a question of getting things in order a bit. We’ve each got our own remit, and this is mostly the Muggle stuff, so that’s why it’s in here. I’m behind, that’s all.”

“These are witness statements?”

“Well.” With Hannah coming over all brisk like this, Remus started to feel ashamed of his filing (or lack of it). “Witness statements, yeah, and then—well, the ones where people have said things about Muggles. Copies of those, and letters we’ve gotten that mention Muggles, and some of it’s—there’s a bit of an overlap, because my colleague Layla Amin manages the Ministry’s internal business, but some of these are files from the Muggle Affairs office, and then these—”

Hannah pushed up the sleeves of her cardigan and the bridge of her glasses. “What sort of coding are you doing with the witness statements?”

Remus blinked at her.

“Or, what do wizards call it? Who’s keeping track of the numbers?”

“The numbers of what?”

Hannah gave an incredulous little laugh. “The numbers of—everything! What sort of system are you using to go through the witness statements and say, right, this one’s got homicide and Muggle business and, I dunno, governmental corruption, and this one mentions Nymphadora Tonks doing something terrible to them, and this one—”

Remus said, “Er.”

“What I thought.” Hannah peered over the top of her spectacles, as if verifying what she was seeing through them. “All right, it’s a disaster, but I’ll take it on. Take me to your leader.”

To Remus’s astonishment, Layla took to Hannah at once. “What a good idea,” she said, with more warmth in her voice than Remus had ever heard there before. “We’re drowning, and the thing’s barely gotten started.”

The Healer, Trish, who for once was in the office for a full day, swiveled around in her chair and catapulted herself forward to shake Hannah’s hand. “We’re glad to have you here, dear. If you wouldn’t mind starting with me—”

“She’s not starting with anyone.” Remus couldn’t keep the edge out of his voice. Bloody Trish.

Hannah shot him a look.

“No, he’s right,” said Layla. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your family name, Ms.—”

“Waterfield,” Hannah said, fast enough that nobody else noticed (Remus hoped) that Remus didn’t know her surname.

“Ms. Waterfield should have free run of all our papers, so that she can begin to assess how to move forward. From what I can tell, the Muggles run circles around us when it comes to managing their archives, and I shall be very happy to have her assistance.” Layla nodded briskly and resumed her seat.

“The boss has spoken,” Jack said _sotto voce._

Remus kicked his chair, and Hannah—to his very great relief—laughed.

“Has anyone—Remus, dear, do forgive me if I’m retreading familiar ground, but has anyone spoken with the Ministry about requisitioning Muggle money for her to be paid?” This was from Pomona, who was looking increasingly haggard over her allotted work. Remus had offered to spell her—swap out the rapes for the goblin torture for a few days—but she’d pointed out, rightly, that there wasn’t much to choose between.

“Would you look into that, Pomona?” Layla said without looking up from her work. “I doubt Remus has the faintest idea of how to manage it.”

Recognizing this as the kindness to Pomona that it was intended to be, Remus handed Hannah over and volunteered to fetch lunch for the lot of them. He felt almost cheerful. Not quite cheerful, but something like it, hopeful at least that the five of them and the support staff could manage this impossible task.

By the end of the day, the lot of them had been put sternly in their place by an increasingly confident Hannah. She had coopted one of the statement-takers, a plump Ravenclaw called Mary whom Hannah pronounced the most sensible of the staff, to build a magical database.

“A what?” said Jack.

“A database. Go back to work.” (Remus liked Hannah anyway, but he liked her more for how quickly she had caught the knack of their jokes, the way everyone told Jack to go back to work, the teasing deference they all gave Layla.) “Like a catalog,” she explained, aiming the words at Remus, “to categorize the different kinds of abuses, and how often they came up, and make it easy to get from specific cases to the full statement they came from. And then to keep track of who’s come in to speak with you, and who still hasn’t been asked in.”

Nobody had been asked in, so far, at least not on the basis of being mentioned in anyone’s testimony. Everyone kept saying they’d get to it, and nobody did, on the fairly legitimate basis that they had their hands full taking statements from people who wanted to give them in the first place.

“That can be Phase Two,” Jack kept saying, whenever it came up.

The real truth was that nobody wanted to be the one to send the letters. Coverage of the commission had been mostly positive since Remus’s explosion on the steps of Grimmauld Place. The idea of changing that, of inviting reporters to turn nasty and call it a witch hunt, made all five of them sick to their stomachs. It wasn’t only Death Eaters who would get letters, and that was the hell of it. Remus had heard about kids at Hogwarts casting _Cruciato_ on each other, business owners in Diagon Alley refusing to allow Muggle-born wizards through their doors, half-bloods torturing goblins they met on the run to try and get back the money in Gringotts they were forbidden to access.

Summoned by owl, Tonks arrived promptly at half-four to collect Hannah and to give the impression that they were meeting for the first time. She managed it surprisingly well. Remus always forgot that she was an Auror. Stealth and spying were—despite her utter unfitness for it, in his opinion—in the job description.

He Apparated home to find the house full of the smell of dinner cooking, and Sirius’s voice rising from the parlour, which was where he usually took fire calls from Harry. Remus scooped a spoonful of cheese artichoke something out of the hot pan and carried it round to the parlour, biting very carefully to keep from scalding his mouth.

“Oi!” he said as he entered.

Sirius jolted hard, and Harry did not smile at him. Their conversations had never been private, at least not so private that Remus could not participate in them, but maybe that had changed. Remus bought time for himself by blowing on his spoonful of food. In the fire, Harry’s head craned up to get a look at Remus. Sirius had gone still as a gravestone.

Since neither of them seemed inclined to speak, Remus said, “What?”

“Nothing,” said Sirius. “Fucking nothing.”

“Sirius,” Harry said, a warning note in his voice.

“I’ll—” Abruptly, Sirius sagged, his shoulders slumping inward, his head down. “Fuck. Yes. I’ll—Harry, mate, I’ll speak with you soon, yeah?”

Fear clenched at Remus’s heart. “Hang on, hang on, I’ve not talked to Harry yet. Are you back in England? Did it all go all right?”

Harry glanced at Sirius.

“What’s going on?” said Remus.

His posture weary, Sirius waved a hand at Harry.

“Er,” Harry said. “Well, I didn’t want to say anything while we weren’t sure, but I s’pose it’s all right now that we’ve—yeah. Er. It’s just that we’ve caught Fenrir Greyback. He was in Hungary—er. Well. We’re bringing him back to stand trial.”

There was a roaring in Remus’s ears. He put a hand on the back of one of the chairs, to steady himself. Greyback, in London again. Remus had not seen him since the Battle of Hogwarts, but he could remember it exactly. That vicious smile of Greyback’s, his teeth like fangs. Had he known, somehow, when he looked at Remus, known who he was?

Remus could not remember the attack, nor much of the aftermath. He had been too small a boy, or it had been too frightening. Sometimes he thought that he remembered walking into the forest by himself—he was allowed to wander a little ways in, so long as he stayed where his mother could see him. He remembered the smell of pine, but that could have been from any of the days before the bite.

They had moved, not long after. North. His parents kept saying that it would be good for him to be near the river. Small and bewildered, Remus had thought they meant that the waters of the Severn would cure him, but they scolded him when he tried to drink it. One night he crept out all alone, terrified in the darkness, and submerged himself in it. The next full moon, he could remember the sharp sting of betrayal when he turned into a wolf after all.

Sirius shook him.

“What?” said Remus. He glanced up and saw that the fire was gone, and Harry’s head with it. Hell. “Sorry. Sorry. I—sorry.”

“Shut up about sorry.” But Sirius’s eyes were wary, the eyes of a man who is handling a wild animal. (Remus was, he was a wolf, he was a wild animal, he could not be trusted.)

“I think,” Remus said, “that I would like to get extremely drunk.”

* * *

When you needed to get irresponsibly drunk, there was nobody better than Sirius Black. Remus was relieved to find that this was still true. Sirius installed him on the sofa with instructions not to budge, tucked him in with a blanket, a book, and a cup of tea, and went out for supplies. An hour later, Sirius burst back into the living room and began lining up bottles until they stretched across the full length of the parlour.

“There,” he said, proud.

Remus couldn’t help laughing. “What the hell’s all that?”

“Experiments!” Sirius cast a wordless spell that had every one of the bottles open. It wasn’t a spell with which Remus was familiar. School had been like this. Sirius doing miracles as if they were nothing, all white teeth and bright eyes. “What end shall we start with?”

They started at the far end of the parlour, handing bottles back and forth between them, Sirius maintaining a steady stream of chatter about what each one tasted like and whether it was worth keeping. “Anise,” he said of one, pulling a horrible face.

“No, ta,” said Remus.

“What!” cried Sirius. “Moony, Moony, Moony! You’ve tragically misunderstood what kind of a night we’re having! You can’t _no ta_ out of this! We’ve got to try each and every one, we’re having a Muggle Booze Experimentation Evening.”

“If the point is to cheer me up—”

“Using all the alcohol! Now here. Have a bit. You can take quite a small sip if you like,” said Sirius generously. “But you’re having a sip if I have to pour it down your throat.”

The image flashed like stars across Remus’s eyes. His head tilted back, Sirius’s eyes on his face, Sirius pressing the bottle against his lips like a kiss. The sting of the alcohol in his throat. Because he couldn’t not, he imagined Sirius taking the bottle away, kissing his mouth fast and messy, the taste of anise on both their tongues.

He shivered.

“I can still take you,” threatened Sirius—a far, far worse mental image. At risk of embarrassing himself, Remus grabbed the bottle—its red label said OYZO—and had a swig.

“Ugh, ugh, ugh. Ugh.” He wiped his mouth, and Sirius’s eyes tracked the motion. Remus’s thoughts were not civilized. _You can’t take me_ hovered at his lips. He didn’t say it. If he had, then Sirius would tackle him. He knew Sirius, this Sirius, the Sirius of wicked nights and indulgences, and Sirius would lunge at him and pin him underneath his own body and Remus would make a show of struggling that was not really struggling, and Sirius, perhaps, perhaps—

“Onward,” he said, his voice a croak.

Nine bottles down the line, he was feeling the alcohol very much. “We may need to stop.”

“Oh, we’re not stopping.” Sirius was drunk too; his voice had taken on that over-careful enunciation that it did when he was trying not to show that he’d had too much. “It’s all these bottles or bust. It’s that kind of night.”

Oh, God. Oh _God._ He had always said that, when they were in school—fuck, how had Remus forgotten? How could he have forgotten, the way he would balk and James would scoff and Sirius, Sirius, Sirius would look at him sideways and wicked and say in his beseeching-sweet spoiled-child voice, “It’s that kind of night.”

Sirius touched his hand. “Remus.” He never called Remus by his name; the gentleness of it made Remus want to weep. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want, yeah? I was only—this is for you, so I—it’s only what you want.”

What he wanted was to be kissed hard and deep. What he wanted was for Sirius to pull his head back by the hair and bite at his throat. Their bodies lined up together, touching everywhere. Merlin, he was drunk. “It wasn’t that,” he said, aware that he was being maudlin. “It’s—I missed you. I missed you.”

“I missed you too, you wanker.” Sirius was not quite looking at him. It hurt unexpectedly badly.

“Fucking Greyback,” said Remus, to make Sirius come back to him.

It worked, of course. Sirius was so predictable in some ways. His face lit up with a smile, and he handed Remus the next two bottles. “To fucking Fenrir Greyback getting what he fucking deserves.”

“Cheers,” said Remus.

* * *

The next morning, Remus had a vicious hangover, and Sirius wasn’t in much better shape. He still, however, got up before Remus did and made omelettes, which suggested that he was still feeling sorry along some axis. Sorry for having kept it a secret that Harry was hunting Greyback, as if Remus were too fragile for the knowledge? Sorry for Remus altogether, pitiful Remus with his tragic backstory and scars nobody would ever see?

It wasn’t pity he wanted from Sirius.

Sirius had gone out for coffee and brought an extra back with him, which he described as Remus’s favourite and which Remus could not recall ever having tasted before. It tasted of far too much vanilla and not nearly enough coffee.

“Have you thought of coming in and helping us?” Remus asked. The shit coffee made him ask it, he thought possibly, or the pity. Knowing that Sirius would say no.

“Helping you?” said Sirius.

“Yeah, helping, you’ve heard of that, haven’t you? Tonks’s girlfriend is helping out, why not you?”

Something flickered behind Sirius’s eyes. Remus had said that wrong. As if Sirius were— As if he thought that—

“We’re paying her,” said Remus, trying to take it back without appearing to be taking it back. “I don’t think we could pay you. There’s not a tremendous amount of money. It wouldn’t be worth it, I don’t suppose.”

“I’m very, very rich.” Sirius gave Remus a smile that showed all of his teeth. He was being deliberately provoking. Remus wished he knew why.

Remus took too large a sip of coffee, scalding his mouth in an intense burst of vanilla. “Do whatever you want, then.” He stopped himself, just, from saying something vicious about Sirius’s inability to leave the house (the house that he hated, had always hated). Sirius had been magnificent the night before, and his secret room was getting close to ready, and it was unkind to poke at anybody’s weak points.

He took the Underground to the Ministry, as he wasn’t sure his stomach and head would bear Apparition or travel by Floo, but this was a mistake, as well. The weather was damp enough to make his scar ache, and that made him think of Greyback. He bit hard on his tongue to distract himself, and pressed his fingers into the place on his shoulder where the scar was ugliest, that raised white twist of broken skin.

There had been a Muggle, a few years ago; Remus couldn’t remember his name now. Tallish, regrettable nose, excellent hands. “I don’t take off my shirt,” Remus had told him, what he told everyone he pulled.

In Remus’s experience, blokes either accepted that—everyone had preferences—or pestered him with questions about it, in which case he left. He didn’t need to be polite, it wasn’t about being polite. But this Muggle, this one Muggle, he’d had some sort of job like—Remus couldn’t remember what, something unbearable to do with emotions (he was American). His eyes had gone soft, and he had said, with very great gentleness, “Did someone hurt you, sweetheart?”

Remus thought of Sirius.

He thought of Sirius _first,_ and then he shoved himself away from the other man and was messily, shudderingly sick in the bin.

He had been pissed off his arse that night. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, and he’d had more to drink than he could take, that was all. The Muggle had been kind to him, after. Brought a wet cloth and cleaned his face, called him _sweetheart_ again and told him that nothing was his fault. He put clean, floral-scented sheets on the sofa and held Remus’s hand while Remus fell asleep.

That was the year after Sirius got out of prison, and Remus could be forgiven for taking a moment to remember that Sirius was back, alive, not a traitor. If he’d ever been able to tell Tonks the story, humiliating as it was, she’d have said that he didn’t do anything wrong and it wasn’t wrong to _feel_ things now and again.

But it was wrong, it was unforgivable, that he had thought of Sirius first, and Fenrir Greyback second. He couldn’t forget it.

He could feel the scar under his singlet and the thick layers of his robes. Sometimes he wondered if other people could see the scar through his clothes, not the details but the outline of it. He knew that they couldn’t, that it was his own insecurity, but on certain days, the thought of it occupied a vast swathe of territory in his mind.

Taking the lift down to the truth commission floors, Remus managed to chat pleasantly with a witch from Misuse of Magic, whose name he had once known and now couldn’t remember. It felt exhausting. His head pounded rhythmically, and his shoulder twinged. Getting old was bloody hell; he must remember to travel back in time and tell his younger self not to bother with it.

Hannah was in the hallway outside the main office, chatting brightly about databases to a wizard with long, messy dark hair like—

“Sirius?”

Sirius turned, wearing the smile that said he came very much from the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. “Late,” he said, to Hannah. He pointed at Remus with his chin and then, solemn-faced, mimed the act of drinking.

Hannah bubbled out a laugh. She looked every inch the cat that swallowed the canary. Remus would be happy for her once he’d had some proper coffee.

“What are you doing here?” he said stupidly, to Sirius.

Sirius ducked his head, letting his hair obscure one eye. “You asked me,” he said.

I asked, Remus thought, his mind still not agreeing to wrap around the notion. I asked, and you came.


	6. Chapter 6

**Excerpted from Witness Testimony Archives for the Commission of Inquiry into the Wizarding Wars, 1978–1998**

**Statement Taker:** Cosmos Arkwright  
 **Date:** 22 August 2000  
 **Witness:** Narcissa Malfoy (age 44)

You know my son, don’t you? I know that some of you know my son.

Oh, I don’t think that’s likely. No, I should put that out of my mind, if I were you. My son has enough reasons not to trust the Ministry—and he was a child while all this was going on. I don’t imagine that you plan to prosecute children, do you?

The Minister has said so. Kingsley Shacklebolt has said so. I’m sure then we’ll all rest easy. Men in government are renowned for not going back on their words. Well, I want to have it on record that my son was a victim in all this. What we went through when the Dark Lord was occupying our home—were you at Hogwarts at that time?

Then your little brother must have given you some idea what it was like. At home we were—subject to his whims, constantly, and when we went out into the rest of the Wizarding World— We were shunned. Bella didn’t care, my sister, but I—people I had known all my life shrank away from me as if I were poison. If Bella saw them, she would take revenge on them, and I tried to— You have to understand that I was protecting my boy.

I suppose that doesn’t carry much weight, does it? I suppose that all of us believed we were protecting someone.

* * *

There followed the awkward business of introducing a visibly nervy Sirius to the rest of the commissioners. Trish was not in yet, and Sirius already knew Pomona. Layla shook his hand very firmly and held it for a few seconds longer than would have been quite natural, her eyes searching his face. Remus didn’t know for what. Finally she said, “We shall be glad to have the help. Remus has done tremendous work for us.”

Remus’s face went hot, and he did not quite catch whatever charming thing Sirius said in response about Layla’s own work. It was not Layla’s giving him a compliment, so much as the assumption that a compliment to Remus would be a delicate attention to Sirius. He knew that he was—imperfect at hiding what he felt for Sirius, but he hadn’t imagined he was quite as transparent as all that.

“Jack Gascoyne,” Remus said, jerking his head at Jack, behind him.

“Notorious mass murderer Sirius Black,” said Jack sonorously.

Remus whipped around to face Jack, backed him up a few steps. “You don’t call him that. You’re never to say that again, d’you hear?” His voice was loud. It filled up their small office.

Layla’s eyebrows vanished into her fringe. Remus wet his lips and lowered his hands, which he had not been conscious of raising.

“All right, mate.” Jack had his hands up, palms out. “All right.”

“No worries,” said Sirius, and he flashed Jack his best smile. “Remus, where’m I meant to be?”

“I’ll, I’ll show you.” Remus sank down gratefully into his office chair so that he could dig in his desk for the spare office keys. It took him far too long to find them, but he didn’t dare look up to see what looks were on the others’ faces. He jerked his head at Sirius to follow.

Sirius was quiet as they walked down the hall, quiet when Remus was fiddling the keys in the lock of the spare office. As they went into the overflow room and put on the lights, Sirius said, “It doesn’t matter, you know.”

“It fucking does,” said Remus through his teeth.

“Not to me.”

Remus turned to him. To be able to turn around and find Sirius there remained a minor miracle all these years later. “To me, then. It matters to me. You’re innocent, you—everyone knows you’re innocent.”

“Not everyone knows.” Sirius leaned against the doorframe, one eye on the hallway.

“Then they should.”

“Well, _he_ does,” said Sirius, meaning Jack.

“Then he should keep his mouth shut.”

Unexpectedly, Sirius smiled. The fond smile that made Remus feel like a pet, the one he resented and craved. “You’re awfully good to me.”

If he just, if he only, if he took two steps closer, put himself in Sirius’s space, if he put a hand on Sirius’s arm (he knew exactly where, his palm light against the crook of Sirius’s elbow, his thumb sliding down to rub the knobby bone), if he did that, would Sirius—

“It’s the least I—after everything,” he said, desperate for Sirius to stop looking at him like that.

“What?” said Sirius, laughing a little.

“After—you know.”

“I don’t, actually. After?” He still looked fond.

Remus’s skin crawled with how little he deserved it. _Please,_ he thought. _Please don’t make me say it._ But Sirius stayed where he was, and the seconds ticked by, relentless. Finally, Remus said, “I could have made Dumbledore let me see you. Back then. I, I think I could have.”

To his horror, Sirius’s face only softened. He said, “Oh, Moony.”

Remus waited, but Sirius didn’t say anything more. He needed, he needed and needed for Sirius to stop looking at him with soft eyes, tender dark eyes as if he were precious. “Oh Moony _what,_ ” he said furiously. “Don’t—don’t—I mean it. I do. He said I _shouldn’t_ see you. He never said I couldn’t. Nobody—” His voice cracked.

Sirius jolted forward a little; then caught himself and leaned back against the door frame.

“Say something!” Remus shouted. “If I hadn’t been—if I weren’t such a fucking coward and a— If I hadn’t gone crawling to _Albus Dumbledore_ for scraps of approval when he’d, God, when he’d seen to it that you’d never—”

“I wouldn’t have told you,” said Sirius.

Remus had intended to go on shouting, but that stopped him. “What?” he said stupidly.

A hank of Sirius’s messy black hair fell into his face. “I decided when they took me away that I wouldn’t tell you, even if I got the chance. It was still my fault. All those people being dead, James and Lily.”

“It wasn’t,” said Remus, still too stunned to say anything sensible. Sirius was supposed to hate him, when he found out. When he learned how thoroughly Remus had abandoned him. They had been hiding from it all this time.

“It was, really.” Sirius’s tone was light, as if they were debating a slightly interesting news story in the _Prophet._ “I told them to change to Peter. I could have told them to make you Secret Keeper, or we could have never changed at all, and I— Well. I didn’t, did I?”

The room smelled of cedar and soap. Remus felt sick.

“I practiced lying to you.” Now Sirius’s eyes were far away, Azkaban eyes, looking into the past. “After they told me that I was never going to leave. I imagined you’d come, and I knew you hated me, I knew that, of course you would, and I’d—I thought of everything I’d say, so that you’d think it was all true. So you’d feel you really knew. At least I’d know, then, that you were all right.”

I wasn’t, Remus thought. I wasn’t all right. I wasn’t anywhere close, without you. “Why?” he managed.

Sirius looked at him as if he were mad. “I’ve said. It was bad enough, without you—it was bad enough as it was.”

Do you remember when we kissed, Remus thought. Do you remember the way you smiled at me, and I left you. I left you. “I’m sorry I didn’t come.”

“No, I mean—when you didn’t, I was—glad, a little.” Now Sirius did push his hair out of his face, a swift and elegant gesture. “I wouldn’t have liked seeing you hate me. Everyone at the sentencing hated me, you could see it. Like being at a family reunion.”

That last bit was meant as a joke. Remus wanted to hunt down and individually tear the throats out of every person on the Black family tapestry. Instead, he said, “I came to the sentencing. I tried to—you didn’t see me.”

“You did?” Sirius’s voice was soft.

“Yes.”

As tended to happen when emotions threatened, Sirius abruptly changed the subject. “This place looks like it’s been cursed to all hell by a squad of angry Death Eaters, doesn’t it?”

“Piss off,” said Remus, relieved. “It’s only been me sorting through the post, as my lazy housemate’s taken this long to deign to come down and help me.”

Sirius smiled in the way that charmed Remus most, the smile that said he was doing it half against his own will, because he couldn’t help it. “Well,” he said. “Well. I’m here now.”

Though they were too busy throughout the day to talk much, Remus found Sirius’s presence soothing. He felt safer in a way he could not quite identify: Was it that he imagined Sirius could protect him from danger, or was it that he liked having Sirius under his eye where he knew that he was safe?

And it was easier to get to his own work, with Sirius there to sort through the post, or to go dashing from the overflow office to the main one with questions and letters, or to steal the lunch food when it was sent up. Remus had time enough to do what he had been trying not to, and begin making notes from the transcripts of witness statements. He gave himself the gift of putting off trying to search for Greyback’s victims; time enough for that once Hannah had—as she kept promising she would be able to do—found a way to let them sort statements by criminals named in them. Instead he went through goblin and house-elf statements and wrote pleading messages to the centaurs of the Forbidden Forest, Puzzlewood, and Brechfa to consider coming in to make statements.

 _It is my dearest wish,_ he wrote, gritting his teeth, _that non-humans like myself should have our voices heard in this commission. Voldemort believed that wizards wouldn’t care what happened to your community. I would like very much to put in place a permanent record of his error._

“Pads,” he said.

Sirius, who was on the floor with his back to Remus, tilted his head all the way backward. It turned his throat into a long, scruffy line. Remus wanted to put his mouth against it. “Mm?” said Sirius.

He wanted to ask, _Do you think I’m human?_ “Is—are you going along all right?”

“Yeah?” Sirius said.

“Are—do you want—if there’s anything you don’t—”

“Moony.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

 _Was it because I’m not human that you thought I was a spy?_ But there had been enough honesty, he thought, for one day, and enough talk of the past. “Nothing,” he said, “sorry. I keep thinking about Greyback. It’s got me—I dunno.”

Sirius let his body fall the direction of his tilted-back chin, so that he lay flat on the floor, his legs still crossed. “D’you want me to kill him for you?”

Caught off guard, Remus barked a laugh. “What, and have you sent back to Azkaban, just when—”

Sirius’s lips parted. He had a mobile and lovely mouth. “Just when?”

“Just when I’ve got you here for unpaid labour,” said Remus, a little weakly.

Sirius laughed then, too, and rolled himself liquidly back to a seated position in a way that would have buggered Remus’s back if he had tried it. Being a werewolf was bloody awful for your flexibility. “I’ll wait until this lot’s finished then. I shouldn’t like to see all this post unanswered.”

* * *

They settled into something like a routine. Sirius never said, at breakfast, whether he was coming to the Ministry that day. Some days he did, and others not, and Remus tried not to let himself dwell overmuch on what Sirius’s head was like on the days he stayed home. He gave himself a rule to settle his mind: If Sirius came in twice a week, and spoke to at least one other person at the Ministry he didn’t have to, then it was victory.

Another victory was that Sirius liked Hannah. When she finished setting up what she called her _database,_ and began demanding that the Ministry hire more staff, Sirius came into the main office and backed her up vociferously.

“If you’re going to do this, you’ve got to devote the resources it needs to doing it right,” Hannah said.

“Else why bother?” Sirius agreed.

“You can’t tell the stories without using numbers to contextualize them,” said Hannah, “and you won’t have any numbers unless you’ve got someone going through your statements and coding which ones say what.”

“Very rash to overlook the coding,” said Sirius.

Hannah tossed him a look, and Sirius grinned at her—his trouble-making grin. It wrenched Remus’s heart, rather.

“Do you know what coding is?” said Hannah.

“It is,” said Sirius expansively, “the _sine qua non_ of a proper commission of inquiry. Don’t you think so?” This to Remus.

 _I love you,_ Remus thought. And he thought that it was high time he stopped messing around, and gave Sirius his lair. It was as finished now as it was ever going to be. He would affix the spell to the large cupboard in the bottom of Sirius’s mother’s armoire and give it to Sirius in the morning before they went to work. They, before they went, the two of them both together, to do the work they both were doing (together). The idea made him smile.

* * *

He stayed awake late, tidying up the room, less because there was anything to tidy and more because he liked the feeling that he was going about the business of making something that Sirius would love. First he had helped Sirius to get out of the house, that bloody Grimmauld Place, and now he was giving Sirius something in the house to not hate. A safe and cozy place to go.

Maybe they would sit on the couch together and drink from the same bottle of firewhiskey passed back and forth between them. On nights when it was cold, they could build a fire, and share a blanket.

Sirius had kissed him on a couch. One frozen, wet January night. Remus couldn’t remember what the mission had been, but he remembered, vividly, waiting at Sirius’s horrible London bedsit, his stomach in knots, wondering if he should have gone too. Hours, he’d waited, and then it was over: Sirius was back, vivid with excitement, gasping out the whole story as he threw himself (muddy, wet, doglike) onto the couch in a way that overlapped Remus’s legs and stopped him escaping.

“Slow down,” he said, laughing because Sirius was irresistible, always, but especially now. “Slow down, Pads, I haven’t heard a word.”

“It was brilliant!” Sirius cried, and he fell forward onto Remus’s chest, panting.

And. And, and. And Remus put his arms around him. He could never think what had given him the courage. And Sirius picked up his head. And Remus could not remember what Sirius’s face had looked like, just then, if he had been surprised or alarmed or delighted. It was impossible to remember, because the next thing that happened was that Sirius stretched up and kissed him.

Even the memory was like being struck repeatedly by Shock Spells. Sirius’s tongue in his mouth. How easily Remus had opened for him, given himself up to it. Sirius’s hands, cold and damp, long fingers purposeful, tilting Remus’s face sideways to give himself better purchase. The weight of him, back before Azkaban, before he had become so terrifyingly, skeletally thin, heavy against Remus’s shoulders and hips and thighs.

“Sirius, please,” Remus gasped, but the words got lost against the hunger of Sirius’s mouth. So he only thought it: _Please,_ when he reached up for more, _please_ when he dug his fingers into the nape of Sirius’s neck and heard him whimper, _please_ when Sirius shifted, pulled back a little, nuzzled his nose against Remus’s chin.

“I want, I want,” Sirius whispered.

Anything, thought Remus. Bloody anything.

Just then, just as it might have—just as it would _have to have_ resolved itself, one way or another. Horrible mistake or—

But James had come home, and Sirius had never spoken about it again. Remus hadn’t dared to bring it up, either, in case Sirius didn’t remember or didn’t care.

That was in the past. They were so young then, so stupid. The age Harry was now, for Merlin’s sake. If they ever—if Remus, if Sirius—

It would be different now. They knew what they wanted, or at least one of them did. Remus moved the sofa across the room, so that it faced the fire directly, then moved it back. At the Ministry, when they had been talking about the old days, it couldn’t have been his imagination that Sirius had made to touch him.

He stayed awake until nearly three, Apparating silently in and out of various bits of Grimmauld Place while Sirius slept, fetching his deebeedees and his talking photograph screen, organizing them attractively in the secret room, moving furniture forward and back. He fell asleep finally on the sofa where he hoped Sirius would one day kiss him.

In the morning, he passed the cabinet key to Sirius along with the butter.

“What’s this?” said Sirius.

“It’s a surprise. Something I made for you.”

Sirius gave a heartbreaking, bewildered, lovely smile. “Made for me?” he repeated, running a thumb along the key’s teeth. “What’s it go to?”

“Do you want to see now, or after breakfast?” said Remus, as if he didn’t know what the answer would be.

“Now!” Sirius leapt up.

Feeling happily in control for once, Remus led Sirius into the drawing room and indicated the armoire with a great flourish of his hand.

“What?” said Sirius. His smile had shifted, somehow.

“Unlock it!” Remus tapped the knuckles of the hand where Sirius clutched the key. “It’s for you, it’s—but don’t mention it at work, it’s a bit illegal.”

As Remus had known he would, Sirius liked that. He laughed and said, “Unlock which bit?”

“Where you used to hide and read,” said Remus. He could picture it exactly, tiny Sirius curled up safe and sound. Maybe not with a book—Remus was the one who read for the pleasure of it, and Sirius impatiently, to find things out—but with a wand borrowed from one of his parents, perhaps trying out spells, or with some of his toys.

Sirius knelt down in front of the armoire, rattling the key stagily in the lock. “Why’ve you hidden whatever-it-is in my old—”

The lock clicked, and the cabinet door swung open. The light from the fire in the secret room washed warm and golden into the cold grandeur of the drawing room.

Sirius didn’t say anything.

He should have put music on the Victrola, Remus thought. Then there would have been firelight, and music playing. He tried to read Sirius’s mind by staring intently at the back of his head.

Or perhaps he should have dispensed with the fire. Stupid thing to have, really, in the middle of August, even if they were in the middle of an unseasonably cold week. He had liked the sound of the crackling, and the orange-gold light it made.

Sirius still hadn’t spoken.

“It’s a room,” said Remus. “It’s—you can go inside. There’s a ladder you can climb down, or we can Apparate in if—”

“Oh brilliant.” Sirius’s voice was flat. Nothing could have sounded less like _brilliant._ “I’ll, er—after work, I s’pose. Not really time to go in now, eh?”

They had another hour before they had to be at the office. Remus couldn’t work out if this was worth saying. “Whatever you like,” he said. “It’s for you. I thought it could be a, a bit of a refuge, since—times when you’re not feeling all right about going out, you know, we could—” He bit his tongue. He hadn’t meant to say _we._

“Moony, can you check if the water’s boiled?”

Remus would rather have been hit in the face than asked that question in that tone, bright and false. You can tell me you hate it, he thought. You can tell me you want me to go away and leave you alone. “Yes,” he said.

He meant to leave it there and not ask anything else and not be pitiful. But as he was crossing what seemed an interminable length of drawing room, dodging boxes of weapons and shields and spellbooks that Sirius had intended to organize for Harry but hadn’t gotten round to, it occurred to him that he might have shown his hand, and that Sirius couldn’t think of a polite way to respond.

As soon as the thought occurred to him, he was convinced of it. Remus didn’t know what else he should have expected. He could have enchanted the clouds to spell out _I love you Padfoot_ and it would have been less obvious, less beseeching, than this warm, comfortable room full of things he’d thought Sirius would like.

“I only meant it as someplace for you to go,” he said when he reached the door.

“No, quite,” said Sirius, sounding bored and posh, every inch a Black.

The water had boiled. Mechanically, Remus made it into tea, ate three bourbon biscuits, and Apparated in to work early. It was a good thing to do, a tactful thing. He was letting Sirius have the house to himself, since Sirius was clearly—whatever Sirius was.

He heard laughter in the hall and poked his head out of the office door. Tonks and Hannah were chattering away, Tonks bent double laughing at something Hannah had said. They were holding hands. Tonks had small hands; her fingers, laced together with Hannah’s, seemed almost child-sized. Something about it made Remus feel vicious.

“Good morning,” he said.

Hannah snapped to attention, but Tonks kept laughing. “Dora, love,” said Hannah. “Dora. I’ve got to get to work. I’ve got to—” She became infected with Tonks’s laugh and tried to keep speaking around it. “Dora, I have to go.”

“At your leisure,” said Remus coldly.

Caught by his tone, Tonks looked up, the laugh still lighting her face. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I’ve got to get to work,” Hannah said, apologizing. She kissed Tonks’s knuckles and disentangled their hands, slid past Remus into the office.

“You all right?” Tonks asked.

“What do you suppose is going to happen?” said Remus.

Tonks glanced sideways, plainly bewildered. “Happen to what?”

“To her, to you. What do you suppose is going to happen when the commission’s finished its work? You won’t be able to see her anymore, not even in secret. They’ll Obliviate her.”

“They won’t,” said Tonks, steely.

“Oh, of course, because you’ll protect her.” Remus’s chest ached, and he pressed a hand to it. “You and your Auror magic, and you’ll dash off romantically on the run together.”

“Don’t be a prick.” Tonks made to go into the commission office, and Remus shifted his body, blocking her path.

“You’re not being fair to her,” he said. “You’re leading her on. You can’t offer her anything, after this. The wizarding world won’t ever welcome her. What do you think will happen, that you’ll get married and live happily ever after?”

“I—not married, I haven’t said married, but—I dunno, maybe,” said Tonks, her voice shrinking slightly.

 _Stop,_ Remus told himself. _Stop it,_ but he couldn’t. Anyway it was for Tonks’s own good; it would save her, in the end, from hoping for things she could never have. “Don’t be a child,” he said. “Sort out your shit.”

Tonks gave a small tight nod and went off down the hall to the lifts, her shoulders hunched. Behind him, Hannah said, “Oi.”

Remus turned.

Hannah’s hands were clenched into fists. She looked fierce and fragile both at once. “The fuck’s your problem?”

“I’ve got to get to work,” said Remus.

“You can speak with me first.” Hannah reached past him and shut the office door. “Dora loves you, but I’ve only just met you and I can’t be arsed remembering when the full moon’s meant to be and whether that means you can say whatever you like to my girlfriend. You don’t speak to her like that.”

The office was too small for a quarrel, but Remus felt like a quarrel, anyway. “You’ve got nothing to do with what I say to Tonks. You’ve known her less than a year; she and I fought side by side in—”

“She’s already thought of everything you said to her! Neither of us is stupid, we’ve _thought_ of all that and we’re sorting it out, we’re trying to sort it out. I think we’ve had a bloody fantastic go of it so far, and you didn’t have anything to do with it. Do you want me to show you our lists of people of interest?”

The abrupt subject change was not enough to jolt Remus out of his anger entirely, but it recalled him, shame-facedly, to the fact that Hannah was helping with something that none of them had been remotely able to manage without her. He ground a palm into his eye socket. “Yes,” he said. “I—yes. You’re right. You’re right.”

Hannah huffed. “I know I am. Come here.”

She led him back to the main office and explained her methods. Even if Remus had been in a good state to listen, he didn’t think he would have understood. She kept saying _algorithm,_ and _coding,_ and he was too ashamed of his outburst over Tonks to interrupt and make her explain properly.

When she had wound down, he said, “That’s brilliant, Hannah. Thank you. Will I need to understand all that to look at the lists of people to bring in for follow-up interviews?”

Hannah laughed—not sincerely, but politely, to show that she was not harboring hard feelings. “No. I would be glad to have you look at the lists, though—or someone—before the staff begin sending out letters asking people to come in and defend themselves.”

“Yes.” Remus felt a dull resignation. They had always been going to have to ask people to come in and defend themselves. It seemed grimly right that an accident of timing would make him the person responsible for setting it in motion.

She unrolled a massive sheet of parchment and tacked it to the wall, careful to match her tacks with the holes already poked through each corner. “You’ve got to do some sort of wand wave,” she said, “and say the data—the information?—that you want to look at. So, you’d say _Wizards named in testimony._ ”

If the spell Hannah had organized had served any other purpose in the world, Remus would have marveled at its cleverness. She and the witch who was assisting her had puzzled it out between them, repurposing Arithmancy charms in ways that went miles beyond what Remus recalled learning in his classes at Hogwarts. Hannah showed him how to bring the information up, her wandwork so precise that Remus half-expected the spell to work when she said it.

“That’s very good,” he said.

Hannah’s cheeks pinked a little. “All right, I can see you’re sorry. Don’t overdo it. Once you’ve got the charts to display, you can sort on any of these columns, but I think the most useful thing will be to sort by how frequently a person’s mentioned in testimony.”

She used Remus’s wand hand to tap at the heading that said _Statements_ and the chart rearranged itself. _Voldemort,_ unsurprisingly, was at the top of the list, and then a rogue’s gallery of Death Eaters below it.

“I think it’s totting things up wrong,” said Remus, “look. Amos Diggory’s listed under Rodolphus Lestrange, but that can’t be right.”

“Can it not?”

“He’s head of a victims’ group, he’s hardly— What?”

“Well, I don’t know who anybody is. Look, you can—tap there, and it’ll—”

Sirius will love this, Remus thought. The charm reminded him a little of making the Marauders’ Map, how much Sirius had adored doing that. Figuring out how to do the piddly bits that made it work exactly the way he and James imagined it. That should have been his life. Something with charms. Something flashy and exciting that everybody loved him for.

“There you go,” said Hannah brightly, as a list of names unspooled on the parchment. “That’s everyone who’s said the person did things to them. And if you say tap the name with your wand and say _Depositio,_ it’ll bring up the transcript of the statement. I’ve not quite figured out how to make it jump directly to the part—”

“Depositio,” said Remus, tapping on a name he didn’t recognize.

“Well,” said Hannah. The parchment had wiped clean the list of names and was now displaying a witness statement in script six inches tall. “It’s not to scale. But you won’t want to use this to actually read the statements, anyway. We’re going to link—” She faltered.

Halfway down the massive enchanted parchment was Amos Diggory’s name. _We were on the streets,_ it said. _They’d taken my wand at the Ministry, and Susan’s had gotten smashed up when we were running from the Snatchers. Amos Diggory cast Cruciatus on her while another wizard held me. I begged him to stop. They called her Slytherin filth._

“Can you make it go,” Hannah said; she didn’t exactly sound like she was asking a question.

Remus nodded, numbly, and let Hannah guide his hand to return the parchment to the previous chart, the list of names of people who were to be called in. Rodolphus Lestrange. Amos Diggory. Theodore Nott. He said, “Are you sure?” and then, “Of course you are. I’m sorry.”

“I can have Mary double-check all the charms when she comes in,” said Hannah. “Who is he? Amos Diggory?”

“He’s—his son. Died.”

He was co-chair of the largest victims’ rights group in Britain, with Molly Weasley. If this were true, it would undo all of Molly’s hard work. The Ministry would have to make inquiries, ask after the money that had been allocated. Molly would have to account for it, go back through everything. All the recognition she’d worked for, restitution for the families, the orphans in particular, and she wept over every one of them. People would forget that, and remember this, because Amos Diggory couldn’t resist chasing revenge.

Hannah touched his arm.

“Yes,” said Remus. “No, I know. I beg your pardon, Hannah. This is—you’ve done brilliantly. I shall request a special commendation for you when this is finished. We’ll show it to the others as soon as they arrive.”

Hannah watched him for a few seconds, her eyes keen, and Remus did his best not to flinch away. Finally, she turned back to the parchment. “If you click this bit here,” she said.

“If I—?”

“Sorry, if you—tap your wand. Just here, it’ll show you the filing location of the—and I’m sorry, I can’t remember what they’re called. The, the videos, or whatever it is, those white bottles they’re filing away after the transcripts are made.”

“Memories,” said Remus. “It’s bottles of memory.”

Hannah gave a silvery, breathless laugh. “You are—I’m sorry, I know you’re—fuckin’ hell, I don’t know how any of you manage to go about your days, living in a world like this. Real, proper memories? Whose?”

Remus couldn’t remember. There had been talk, early on, of offering the witnesses the option of clearing away their bad memories and leaving them behind in vials at the Ministry. He couldn’t remember what had been decided there. Jack was the most vocal opponent of the idea, but it had been left, in the main, down to the statement-takers themselves if they wanted to offer the choice.

“The statement-takers,” he said, “I suppose.”

“I’ll double-check the data,” Hannah said. “All right? To be sure.”

“Don’t bother.” It made a sick kind of sense. Amos Diggory never did anything halfway. Remus remembered wondering why he wasn’t in the Order, why nobody who resisted ever heard a thing from him. This was why. This was what he had been doing.

He thought of Sirius saying, “It would be bloody awful and you’d be good at it, so I expect you’ll go in the end.” And he thought of Sirius going still in that dangerous, ready-to-pounce way he had, staring at the home Remus had made for him.

When he was lonely at Hogwarts—days when he was ill and Sirius and James and Peter had gone dashing off to Hogsmeade or Quidditch without him, or nights in the Shrieking Shack before his friends had worked out his secret—he used to ask himself: Would you rather be home?

Would you rather be home? he asked himself now. Now—as then—the answer was easily no.

To Remus’s intense relief, Sirius had not yet arrived by the time the rest of the commissioners came in and they sat down to discuss Amos Diggory. Jack, who had interviewed him for the _Prophet_ a few times, flatly refused to believe it at first.

“Must be some mistake,” he said.

Layla was flicking through transcripts on Hannah’s massive enchanted parchment. “These stories seem remarkably consistent.” There was a note in her voice that made Remus’s head come up.

“Did you know about this?” he asked.

Layla pressed a palm flat against her collarbone. “There were rumors, at the time.”

“But you—” Remus did not know how to ask the question he wanted to ask. Amos Diggory had been on the selection committee. Layla had come in—they all had—for him to ask questions of her, judge her fitness to take her seat on the commission. “You didn’t say anything.”

“What should I have said?” asked Layla sharply. “In your opinion.”

“I’m not blaming you.”

“Good. What should I have said, in your opinion?”

Remus glanced at Pomona for rescue. She had her chin up, and her eyes shut. There were tears on her cheeks.

“Well,” said the Healer. “Whether these stories are true or not—”

“Whether?” said Layla. “We have here thirteen—fourteen stories of Amos Diggory tracking down and torturing Slytherin Muggle-borns and half-bloods during the war, because he thought he could get away with it, and he did.”

The Healer had her arms wrapped around herself. “I wish they had come forward after the end of the war.”

Layla’s voice rose. “Oh, you wish that, do you? That’s marvelous. How killingly insightful of you to wish for that. Just when violence against Slytherins was at an all-time high, and the person most influential in the disbursement of reparations—”

“You’re right,” said Jack.

Layla stopped talking. She was shaking visibly. If Remus had thought she would welcome a hug from him, he would have given it to her. Pomona was still crying silently.

“Yes,” Remus agreed. “Yes. I mean—there isn’t any question that we’ll bring him in.”

Layla’s eyes snapped up to his, and the look of unguarded surprise there stabbed at him.

“Don’t look like that,” he said. “Of course we’ll bring him in,” although it wasn’t _of course,_ and he hated himself for the suspicion that he’d have changed his mind if the other four had wanted him to. “I only raised it with you lot because it’s bound to bring negative attention to the commission. Particularly if Diggory doesn’t cooperate. We may want to—Layla, please tell me if—I thought, to organize security for you.”

“Yes,” said Pomona, loudly.

Layla wet her lips and made to say something, but then put a hand to her mouth and gave a tiny, tiny shake of her head.

“You don’t have to decide straight away. But if it’s—if you would want it, I’ll see to it. I’ll do it myself,” said Remus. He thought of the reporters lurking around Grimmauld Place and felt unrecognizably furious at the idea of their doing it to Layla. “I think it—would be the worst for you. We haven’t any other Slytherins on the commission.”

It occurred to him that this was by design. The selection panel must have insisted on representation from each house, but Amos Diggory might well have seen to it that Layla was the only Slytherin. The thought of it made his skin crawl. And he would have to tell Molly.

“You’d better watch yourself, mate,” said Jack.

Remus glanced at him.

“Werewolf,” Jack said. “If they’re scapegoating anyway, not bad odds it’s you as well as her. And with Greyback being brought in, and all.”

Yes. With Greyback being brought in. At least, Remus thought, he wouldn’t have to worry about Greyback coming in for the commission. They could send owls to his cell in Azkaban every day until he dropped dead (if he ever did); all Greyback would do would be to laugh and tell them to go fuck themselves.

“Pomona?” said Remus.

“Yes,” said Pomona. Her voice was clogged with tears. “Yes, we’ve got to ask him in. I’m sorry that—I taught him, you see. And Cedric. I apologize.”

“We were at school together,” said the Healer, dazed.

“Fine,” Remus snapped. “Call it four yeses and a no, but we’re still bringing him in. I’ve got to go and see Molly Weasley. Tell her before someone else does.”

He bloody hated Healers.

* * *

Molly owled back that he was welcome to stop in any time, and Remus Apparated there before he could think better of it. (He wanted to be gone from the office, if Sirius came in.) She was looking rather frazzled when he came in, with three sets of knitting needles on the go—“Trying to get an early start,” she explained, “for Christmas”—and a table laden with vegetables to be cut and beans soaking in water and dough rising in covered bowls.

“Anywhere you can find to sit,” she said, waving a hand at the chaos.

“Is this a bad time to—”

“Oh, goodness, no, I could use the company. Would you like any tea?”

Remus accepted the tea, and they chatted about Harry and Ron while it steeped—their general bravery, whether the Auror office was working them too hard (yes), what they had planned for their days off now that the big operation was finished. She didn’t mention Greyback by name, and Remus was grateful for it.

“Well,” Molly said, handing him a cup of tea and a creamer, “I don’t imagine you came here to talk about my boys. What’s happened?”

“Something’s—come up,” Remus said, carefully. “In the commission, in the statements. And I wanted you to, to know about it, from me first, before—I think it’ll come out in the newspapers, and I didn’t want you to learn it from them.”

Molly’s shoulders hunched a little, but she said nothing, waiting.

“It’s about Amos Diggory.”

A long silence followed, in which Remus stared down at his cup of tea and considered ways to say what had to be said as gently as possible. When he looked up, he saw that it didn’t need to be said at all. 

The realization staggered him. He put his teacup down to avoid spilling it; some sloshed over the side, scalding his fingers.

Molly silently passed him a tea towel.

“Thank you,” he said. Then: “Mol.”

“You haven’t got children,” Molly said.

“No.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child.”

I know what it’s like to lose _everyone,_ Remus wanted to say. In the war, it had been hard not to compare. When Arthur died at the Ministry, it had been an unthinkable tragedy, but Molly had not been alone afterward. She had had her children, and the rest of the Order, working in shifts to comfort her and bring food and ensure that she was never alone. On days when it was Sirius’s turn to look after her, those days when she lashed out at Sirius about Harry because she was in pain and he was convenient, Remus used to think: You fool, you don’t know what it would be like if everybody were gone.

But that hadn’t been useful then, and wasn’t useful now. Remus said, “No, I don’t.”

“Cedric was his only—” Molly looked away.

“Half-blood Slytherins and their families have told us stories about him. The commission. We’ve got to ask him in, Mol.” Suddenly sure that one of them had misunderstood, he said, “He was torturing people. One of them was a kid, sixteen years old.”

Molly’s eyes flashed. “ _Ron_ was that age when—” She checked herself. “Sixteen-year-olds weren’t kids in that war. How old was James, the first time he fought a Death Eater? How old were you?”

He had been seventeen or eighteen, but it didn’t matter. “Molly, you can’t possibly approve of—”

“I didn’t say I approve.” She set down her teacup, circled around the table, and began dicing onions, so quickly her hands were a blur. “If he were doing anything like that now, I’d—feel differently, but we were at war.”

“It wasn’t a war against Slytherins,” said Remus, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “The people he tortured had already been—thrown out, lost their wands to Umbridge’s lot, Merlin knows what else. They weren’t our enemy.”

Molly slammed her knife down, just missing her thumb. “If you’ve come to ask me to be on anyone’s side but the man who lost his only son, you’re wasting your time.”

“All right,” Remus said, quietly. “I—all right. I didn’t know that you knew. I wanted to—for you to know about it before it started coming out in the newspapers. There are going to be questions. Wizards for Justice got a fair bit of money from the Ministry, and people will want to know where it went, who decided how it was spent, that sort of—”

“How good of you,” said Molly, “to come here and warn me that you’re going to ruin my work.”

Remus nodded. She was being unfair to him, but then, when had the world ever been fair? He thought, briefly and agonizingly, of Harry. Molly was the only mum he was able to remember. Lily wouldn’t have passed this; she wouldn’t ever. “I’m sorry,” he said, pointlessly.

* * *

He splinched himself a little, trying to Apparate back to London, and found himself outside the Leaky Cauldron with two fingernails gone from his left hand, a smear of blood marking where they had been. What was the spell to sort out fingernails? He couldn’t remember if he knew of one. Molly would know. He could ask her about it if she weren’t been too busy making apologies for war criminals.

 _Nobody comes out clean,_ Pomona said.

Remus certainly had not come out clean. He had spied on werewolf enclaves, his own kind, made them promises from Dumbledore that Dumbledore would have had no power to keep even if he had survived. _You’ll be free,_ he had said. _You’ll have work that pays, and respect from your fellow wizards._

As he trudged through the Tube, Confunding the turnstiles to believe that he’d scanned an Oyster card rather than a blank bit of parchment, he made a glum list of people he’d made hate him this morning so far. Sirius over the secret lair. Tonks over Hannah. Hannah over Tonks. The Healer by not believing in Amos Diggory’s innocence. Layla by believing in it too much. Molly for being a Ministry official and not a friend. They were meant to have dinner with Harry the next night, and they’d have to tell him about Amos and Molly. _That’ll be everyone then,_ thought Remus, ensconced in self-pity. _Make a clean sweep of it._

He shook himself. It wasn’t even noon yet. If he planned to get anything done at all, he couldn’t spend his time thinking this way. If he got through the day all right, he would stop by the house afterward to eat, and then go out and get pissed, and get fucked as well, if he could manage it. _That’ll show Sirius,_ he tried not to think.

It had gone eleven by the time he reached the Ministry, and Sirius still wasn’t there. _Fine,_ he thought. _Fine._ He fetched the approved copy for the letter asking perpetrators in to respond to witness accusations, shut himself in the overflow office, and began sending owls. Phase fucking two. He signed them with his name, Remus John Lupin, Commission of Inquiry into the Wizarding Wars, 1978–1998.

_Fine._

A tentative young Ravenclaw—one of the new support staff Hannah had bullied them into hiring—poked her head in the door at half-one and asked if he wanted any lunch. “Healer Lodge said to ask you,” she said, and, tactlessly, “She said you were in a state, like.”

“No, thank you,” said Remus. Because he was not a child, he did not add _I am not in a state._ He knew he was in a rotten mood, the kind of mood that—in the old days, after James and Lily died—tended to leave him sat in an empty room staring at walls until the landlord came pounding on the door for rent, or until his father showed up and made him feel ashamed of himself for worrying a sick widower. God, he needed to get drunk. He needed someone to shag him against a wall, leave fingertip bruises on his shoulders and thighs. Take his mind off everything else.

“Or some tea,” suggested the Ravenclaw girl.

Remus looked at her, properly. Had he taught her at Hogwarts? She had very straight fair hair and a pinkish nose. “Is your name Emily?” he said.

She smiled. “Yes, Professor. I was a fifth-year when you were at Hogwarts. Taught us loads. Shield Charms? Saved my life a fair few times.”

“I’m glad,” said Remus, and meant it. That was a legacy, wasn’t it? A girl with crooked teeth and good intentions, alive when bad people had wanted her dead. “And sorry that you had to protect yourself like that.”

“Well.” Emily shrugged one shoulder. “Better had to than couldn’t, eh? You sure about lunch?”

“Yes,” Remus said, “but thank you. It’s good of you to ask.”

Wolf night wasn’t for ages, but he couldn’t, somehow, stop thinking of red meat. When he pictured having a steak, he saw himself tearing into it, wolflike, his teeth like fangs, his hands dripping with watery blood. He imagined Sirius coming in while he was doing it, and Harry and Emily and Tonks, watching him in horror. Seeing him for what he was.

He pushed his hands into his eyes. _Stop it, please. Please._

But the thoughts poured in at him, all that afternoon while he was sending miserable, accusing letters, not all of them addressed to cells in Azkaban. Self-respecting witches and wizards wouldn’t allow a known werewolf to make them ashamed of what they had done in the war. He felt as if he were about to be caught, at last; as if he had escaped suspicion all these years through a combination of trickery and invisibility and a lucky choice of friends, and now it was all coming to an end.

(Stop it.)

They would come for him at the office. Layla and Pomona would defend him, maybe Jack too, but they would not be enough. They would fall.

(Please, please stop.)

Or they would come at home, come to Grimmauld Place, tear through the house with Mrs. Black cheering them on. However angry or hurt or whatever it was that he had been this morning, Sirius would defend Remus to the death. He was that loyal. The wizarding world’s acceptance of Sirius’s innocence had never been robust. They had had twelve years to hold him responsible for what happened to James and Lily Potter, who were beloved. They would torture him before they killed him.

Remus pressed his hands to his ears. His eyes burned.

It had been this bad a few times before, years back. The thoughts that pressed in on him, kicked down his doors, left him feeling strange and floaty and distant. Dreams he could not wake up from. He dug stubby, ragged fingernails into the palm of his hand. It helped a little.

 _You’re our Moony,_ Lily used to say, green eyes fierce. She had been good at seeing when Remus was poorly, better at seeing it than he was himself. _We love you and we’re not giving you up._

Remus wondered if she had believed he was the spy. Like Sirius, she had believed it enough to doubt him. To trust Peter more. He missed her.

He duplicated the letter again. He filled in the blanks. _Mr. Erskine,_ and _magical assault against a wandless witch _and _3 September 1997.___

__Another. _Ruskin_ and _torture under the auspices of the Ministry of Magic _and _dates ranging from 22 August 1997 through 4 April 1998.____ _

____Another. _Hobbs. Abetting abduction. June 1996.__ _ _ _

____He thought: Weasley. Concealing habitual practice of torture against innocent and wandless witches and wizards. Dates unknown._ _ _ _

____Another. _Fisk,_ he wrote, his hand steady. _Torture of underage witches and wizards at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, committed after attaining age of majority. Duration of school year 1997–1998.__ _ _ _

____Another. Another. Another._ _ _ _


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tw: dissociation related to trauma, some discussion of child abuse

**Excerpted from Witness Testimony Archives for the Commission of Inquiry into the Wizarding Wars, 1978–1998**

**Statement Taker:** Autumn Holder  
**Date:** 2 September 2000  
**Witness:** Elsie Leicester (age 72)

My sister asked me what good this was meant to do, and I don’t—well, if I’m honest, I didn’t have a good answer for her. You work here. Do they talk about what’s going to come of this? Are they going to, I dunno—I dunno what! What’s going to happen to all this lot?

Oh, on the record, is it? Well, all right. All right.

No, I only asked because—not wanting to say that I’ve had it worse than anyone else has, but we all knew who’d done the damage the last time. We all knew about Lucius Malfoy and those others, we know ’cause we’d seen them do what they came for, what He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named ordered them to do. I knew that. Everyone keeps saying this’ll be a record, but I don’t see why—be a record for what? We knew the Malfoys were a bad lot, knew they’d bribed the government to wash the slates clean, and it didn’t come to anything. When You-Know-Who came back, they went right back to serving him.

No. You’re not getting me. What I mean is they didn’t go back to You-Know-Who because—because of anything about him. They went back because they wanted to hurt people. People like me, Mudbloods. Can I say that here?

Ugly language, but that’s what they say. Them Death Eaters went back to him because of what was in their hearts. They wanted the wizarding world to look different to what it does look, and they didn’t mind—shouldn’t say that, it wasn’t that they didn’t mind, they _wanted,_ to trample on people like me and my grandkids to get there. Do you understand? That was the point. I can’t forget that. No inquiry and whatsit commissions can take that away. I’ve got to live with knowing that there was people, neighbors of mine, who thought I’d be better off dead than a wizard with impure blood.

* * *

When he got home that night, Sirius was gone—or, at the best, refusing to answer when Remus called his name. It wasn’t right to feel relieved, but Remus did, anyway, glad to have the respite of another night’s time before he had to face whatever it was Sirius felt about him.

Masochistically, he went to check on that armoire. The door to the bottom cupboard was locked, and Sirius had left the key sitting on the next shelf up. Remus unlocked the door and climbed inside, half-expecting to find the place in ruins. The switch of gravity from the drawing room to the secret lair was briefly dizzying, the kind of discomfort Sirius had thrived on when they were younger. Nothing inside had been touched. The fire in the grate had burnt itself out.

He Apparated to Gringotts and changed some wizarding money for Muggle—no need to Confund any bartenders when he actually had funds, for a change—and took himself off to one of his old bars. Though he was accustomed to ordering wine in Muggle places, which was pretty much the same in the wizarding world as the Muggle, he remembered Sirius’s experiments and asked for tequila, instead.

“Shots?” asked the bartender.

“Yes,” said Remus. “Two, please, to start.”

He wanted to be drunk enough to bear the touch of a stranger, and that was easy to achieve. A stranger was easy to achieve as well, and Remus was soon rolling his hips into a Muggle called Tom who said he was Remus’s age and acted a decade younger, before realizing that Tom had dark eyes and dark hair and cheekbones like cut glass and a posh accent.

“This is probably not healthy,” he said to Tom.

“Oh, right,” said Tom, licking Remus’s neck.

It didn’t hurt. It didn’t feel good. It felt like nothing. This stranger, this stand-in for the person he really wanted.

“I’m in love with someone,” Remus explained.

“Yeah, you do, love,” said Tom, making it obvious that he wasn’t hearing anything Remus was saying. He put his hand into Remus’s trousers and said, utterly flat, “Oh.”

“Yes, you see, it’s because I’m in love with someone,” Remus said, safe now that he was sure Tom couldn’t hear a word he was saying, “and he doesn’t love me but we’re still stuck with each other. I got him a really good present, and he didn’t like it, so you see, I’m only interested in you because you look a bit like him.”

“Jesus,” Tom said—he must have caught at least some of that, so maybe Remus had been speaking more loudly than he intended to, or maybe it was just that Remus wasn’t hard and wasn’t going to be. “You’re a bloody tragedy, you are. Get something to fucking eat.”

Some time later, and very much drunker, Remus Apparated home. He forgot to be careful of Mrs. Black, who woke up and screamed curses at him until he lost his temper and conjured a small lick of Fiendfyre directly onto her face.

“Monster,” she screamed as her paint melted. “Half blood, filthy corruptor of my line—” and that was the end of it. The end of it forever. Bitch, Remus thought. Fiendfyre was notoriously difficult to control, and Remus was drunk. His skin was stretched tight against his bones, and it felt like wolf night.

“Fuckin’ hell,” said someone. He heard the countercharm. Very sensible. Gratefully, Remus slumped sideways, and Sirius caught him.

“Mate.” Oh, God, Sirius’s voice was too gentle. Remus wanted to turn his face into Sirius’s neck and cling to him. “Moony, oi, what the hell happened?”

“It’s all shit,” Remus said, his words tilting messily into each other. “This whole fucking thing’s—shit.”

“What whole—oh, Moony.” Sirius had been good at managing drunk people even in their first year, a fact that Remus did not like to think too much about. He shifted them both, wrapping one of Remus’s arms around his own shoulders. “All right, let’s get up to bed. You’re having the day off tomorrow.”

“Can’t do.” Remus’s feet got tangled as they walked. He smelled of soot and alcohol, an altogether more vile object even than he usually felt like.

“ _Moony,_ ” said Sirius, as Remus staggered into a wall and nearly brought them both tumbling down. “Am I going to have to carry you?”

Remus laughed. What a thought. Sirius was the taller, but Remus had two stone on him. Perhaps in the old days it would have been possible, when Sirius was well. The thought of that made him want to cry. “You’re too thin. You’re, you, I wanted you to be comfortable. Just one place to be happy. You deserve, you deserve, you know. Don’t you?”

“You are absolutely bladdered.” Sirius maneuvered them around a tricky banister. “Step up, we’re on the stairs.”

“M’tired.”

“I know that, mate, we’re getting you to bed. You’ve got to _keep_ stepping up. Look, seven more to go, then we’ll be there.”

“M’tired.” Had he already said that?

“I know.”

“Not just tonight.”

Sirius’s hand, holding Remus’s wrist at his shoulder, tightened. He said, in a voice that even drunk Remus could hear had changed, “Oh, Remus. I know.”

They attained the top of the stairs, and Remus tried to celebrate by going to sleep on the landing. He slithered halfway down Sirius before Sirius was able to pull him back upright. He made a noise of protest, and Sirius started to laugh, the sound of it warm in Remus’s ears. Laughing weakened him, and they both ended up on the cold wood floor, Remus giggling and Sirius making sounds that were half laugh and half scolding.

“No wonder you never got drunk with us, you bloody disaster,” Sirius said.

His hip was close to Remus’s head. When Sirius was a dog, he nuzzled his head into Remus’s hip-bone, often, often. Did being drunk give Remus the same permission? He thought of it very much. He thought of moving his lips across the line of Sirius’s clothes where they gave way to skin, the gasp of want Sirius would make.

Only he wouldn’t. He would say _Moony, what the hell,_ and chalk it up to drunkenness and they’d never speak of it again.

Loose-limbed and enervated, Remus put out a hand to take hold of the stair rail and dragged himself upright. Sirius leapt to his feet as well, put his hands on Remus’s back at the shoulders, to steer him. If Remus tilted his head to the side, his cheek would brush against Sirius’s fingers.

When they reached Remus’s room, Sirius shoved him lightly between the shoulder blades, and Remus toppled obediently forward into his bed. “Night, Padfoot,” he murmured, rolling partway over. He was tired.

“Oh for Merlin’s—here.” Fingers at his chin, undoing buttons.

“S’fine,” he suggested.

“It’s not fine, you’ve spilled on it. You’re going to be miserable tomorrow, you might as well not smell like the inside of a speakeasy.” Sirius did this last bit in a falsetto voice with a Dales accent, like someone’s mum. In his regular voice, he said, “Sit up so I can get this off you.”

Remus obeyed. He thanked his stars—ha, ha, Sirius was a star—that he was too drunk to respond to Sirius undressing him. With some wrangling, they got the Muggle coat off him, and Remus lay back down, feeling dizzy and unhappy.

“Hang on, hang on,” said Sirius. “I’ve still got your boots to do.”

“I’m sorry.” He meant for the wardrobe, the lair.

“Not nearly as sorry as you will be tomorrow. What the hell happened?” Sirius was beyond Remus’s field of vision, even if he twisted his head a little. The fingers of one hand were undoing bootlaces, while the other rested on Remus’s ankle.

“Couldn’t pull,” said Remus.

That wasn’t what he had meant to say. Sirius’s hands stilled for a moment, then resumed what they were doing. “Do you ever actually untie your boots at all, Moony?” he said, his voice a little strange.

“Amos Diggory.”

“Couldn’t pull Amos Diggory? Well, I’m not tremendously surprised, mate, I have to tell you. Merlin, this is a hell of a knot.” Sirius was doing that thing he did sometimes, talking a very great deal so as not to say whatever it was he was actually thinking. “No matter your personal beauty and charm I suspect Amos Diggory is unpullable by human—”

“Not human,” Remus reminded him sleepily.

A hard yank at his foot. “There, that’s one. Shut up about not human, you bell-end, of course you’re human. What’s this about Amos Diggory?”

“He tortured people. Kids. I’m tired.”

The other boot came off, and Sirius’s hands rested on Remus’s leg—one at his ankle, one on his calf. _Come up here,_ Remus wanted to say. _Stay until I fall asleep,_ but he didn’t say any of that. He never said what he wanted, to Sirius.

“We’ll talk in the morning,” Sirius said.

Remus shut his eyes, and was asleep before he heard Sirius leave.

* * *

When he woke up, it was still dark, and he was still drunk. His mouth tasted like the inside of a toilet, and he was desperately thirsty. He tried to do _Aguamenti_ into his own mouth, but couldn’t, without the lights on, discover what Sirius had done with his wand. Blearily, he swung his legs over the side of the bed and staggered downstairs to the kitchen.

The water was inadequate to make Remus’s mouth less vile. He was going to be sick all day tomorrow, and it hadn’t even been worth anything. He’d not gotten laid, and he’d made a disgrace of himself in front of Sirius.

At least Mrs. Black’s portrait was gone. He could not find it in him to regret that. In his mind he thought he could still hear the crackle of the flames. Bitch, he thought, once more.

As he drank his second cup of water, he realized that he was actually hearing the sound of fire. Not FiendFyre, which roared, but something more manageable. He wondered if Sirius had ever gone to bed, and he took his water glass in search of an answer.

Sirius’s bedroom was empty. The parlour, too, was empty, although a lukewarm cup of tea testified that Sirius had been in there not long before. After a quick glance into some of the rooms they ignored most of the time, Remus came into the drawing room and found Sirius sitting at one end of it, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest. His dark eyes reflected back the flames that were slowly consuming his mother’s armoire.

“Sirius,” he breathed.

“Good idea of yours,” said Sirius, casually, not looking up. “Few modifications. I’m not using the kind of fire that would destroy me the second it touched my skin. Otherwise very clever strategy. Exorcising demons, and that.”

Remus was not as drunk as he had been, but he was miles too drunk for this. He felt as if a hand had taken hold of his heart and begun to squeeze.

Sirius said, “She locked me in.” The flames cast his face in strange, flickering lights.

“When?” said Remus. He thought: Where? but he already knew, in a cold and sticky kind of way. The answer was in front of him, burning.

“When I was a kid.” Sirius’s voice was dreamy. “She hit me, and I caught my head on the edge of it when I fell. I suppose that was what gave her the idea. She said if I liked being in there so much, then—”

The armoire’s lower cabinet was meant for flatware: porcelain plates for company, wedding china. A set of largeish serving platters would have fit, or a grown man’s head and torso. Only a very small boy would have gone all the way inside it. Remus felt nauseated.

“My head had gone all funny, I didn’t know how long—I suppose I must have fallen asleep. Reg let me out eventually, after my parents had gone out for supper.”

“You.” Remus had to try twice for the words. “You’d probably got a concussion, Pads.”

“Spose.”

“I didn’t know,” said Remus, uselessly. “I didn’t—I’d never have—Merlin, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Sirius laughed, still in that unnerving, abstracted way. “You’re always sorry,” he said. “You’re always sorry for the wrong things. It’s interesting to watch you do it.”

 _What should I be sorry for?_ Remus wanted to ask, except that he didn’t think he could live with the answer.

“Did you know she hit me?”

Remus bit his lip. “I—”

“What I mean is,” said Sirius, “did James tell?”

They were fourteen when James told. The four of them got drunk on firewhiskey except for Remus, who poured most of his into the common room fire. Sirius and Peter fell asleep straight away, and James burst into tears and told Remus about the time Sirius had showed up at the Potters, the summer after first year, with a bag of unwashed clothes, a broken wrist, and an angry bruise high up on his cheekbone.

“Yes,” said Remus. He didn’t know what the right answer was; he could only give the true one.

“I always wondered.” Sirius took a swig from a bottle that Remus hadn’t noticed before. (Talking of firewhiskey.) “I wish you didn’t know.”

“You just told me.”

Sirius looked up at him, limpid dark eyes, and Remus remembered that in school, he had seen Sirius’s eyes and thought, brown. Since Azkaban he thought, dark. Sirius said, “I wish you didn’t know. It wasn’t much, really.”

“No,” Remus agreed. He found that he was angry, underneath all the uncertainty. “Only locking you into cabinets for hours. Starving you, sending Kreacher in to make sure you’d never sleep. Giving you a fucking concussion when you were—what? Eight years old? Seven?” He could hear his voice rising, and he modulated it, with an effort. “Don’t say it wasn’t much, that’s—she tortured you.”

“No, no.” Ever unpredictable, Sirius now looked as if he were going to laugh. “She knew Regulus would let me out once they’d gone.”

Nothing was right, nothing was fair. Remus imagined fetching small Sirius out of the cupboard, putting himself between Sirius and his mum, his bloody mum who had made him think he was nothing. I would have protected you, I’d have kept you safe, he thought pointlessly. Anger and sadness burned his throat. “I hate her,” he said.

“You needn’t.”

“It’s no trouble,” said Remus, a hysterical sort of laugh bubbling up. He clenched it back.

Sirius looked at him very hard. “Are you drunk still?”

“Yes.” Remus walked over and sat down beside him. More to please Sirius than because he wanted it, he took a swig of the firewhiskey and enjoyed the burn of it down his throat. More to please himself than because he thought it would be permissible, he leaned sideways and rested his head on Sirius’s shoulder. “I missed you when you were in Azkaban,” he said.

If Sirius winced at his touch or his words, Remus didn’t feel it. Their hands on the floor were a bare inch apart. After a moment, Sirius hooked his little finger over Remus’s. He didn’t say anything.

“Molly knew what Amos Diggory got up to during the war,” Remus said, after a while. “Torturing Slytherins for—I dunno, revenge, I s’pose he thought. But Molly knew about it.”

“Fuck,” said Sirius. A pause. Then: “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Remus said.

“We’ve got dinner with Harry tomorrow night.”

“Yeah,” said Remus.

“Fuck.” Sirius let go of Remus’s hand, and took another drink of firewhiskey. A shelf in the armoire collapsed, sending out a burst of sparks. Two of them landed on Sirius’s bare foot, but he didn’t kick them away. “Well. All right. Look, let me be the one to tell him, yeah? He already knows that Molly and I don’t get on, so.”

Remus waited, then asked, “So what?”

“Don’t be difficult,” said Sirius. He said it in his very poshest voice. Perhaps because Remus was drunk, it seemed crystal clear to him what Sirius was trying to do: quash him so that he would leave alone a subject on which Sirius didn’t want to say more.

“So what?” he said again, stubbornly.

“You can be terribly awkward when you’re drunk, you know.”

At any other time, this would have crushed him. But he felt that he didn’t mind being awkward, just now. “He already knows that Molly and you don’t get on, so, what?”

Sirius looked away.

“You mean that if Harry’s angry,” said Remus—he was angry now himself—“that I should let him be angry with you, and not with me.”

“It isn’t either one of us he’ll be angry at.” Sirius took a swig from his bottle; his knuckles were white around the neck of it. “Molly,” he said, rather gulpily, around a mouthful of liquid.

“Yes, all right, supposing everybody were perfectly logical all the time, yes. He’d only be angry at Molly then. But you think he’s going to be angry at whoever tells him, as well, and you’ve—fucking—decided that it’s going to be you.”

Sirius shut his eyes.

Remus thought of Jack calling Sirius a murderer, and Sirius saying nothing back. He was angrier and angrier. “D’you know what, Pads, you don’t actually have to sit back while people think the worst of you. You’re brave and brilliant and—and I don’t know what else, _brilliant,_ you are—” His accent was making an appearance, which never boded well for coherence. “—and you haven’t got to sit like a lump while—”

Something else occurred to him.

“You sod, that’s what you’d have done if I’d come to see you in Azkaban.” He grabbed Sirius’s forearm and shook it. “You shit. You’d have sat there while I—you’d have let me believe you—”

Sirius opened his eyes and gave Remus a slightly tremulous smile. He had lovely, straight, gleaming white teeth. “All right, all right,” he said. “Don’t have kittens over something I didn’t actually do.”

“It’s _worth something._ ” Remus had been too angry to shake it off entirely, just because Sirius had smiled at him. “Not letting people be wrong about you. Whatever your parents said. The rest of the Blacks. Fuck them. You’ve got to—they’re dead, they’re all fucking dead, so you can listen to _me_ now.”

He was breathing hard. God, he should never drink. Sirius was even more impossible when Remus was drunk.

“What would you say?” said Sirius, low. (Hungry.)

(Hell.)

“I’d.” Remus swallowed, and Sirius swallowed too, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “I—for a start, I’d say that if Harry’s going to be angry at either of us about this, it ought to be me.”

Something softened in Sirius’s face. Something—Remus didn’t want to, couldn’t let himself, think too much about what it was. He said, “You take it terribly hard.”

He had not, Remus thought, intended it for a blow. But it lodged in Remus’s ribs like one, anyway. He let go of Sirius’s arm. “No, I don’t,” he said.

“All right, you don’t,” agreed Sirius easily.

Remus edged away from him. “I don’t—that’s not—”

“Moony?”

What he wanted, Remus thought, all he had wanted when he had gotten up, was a glass of water. It was only because he heard the sound of the fire that he had not gone straight back to bed where he belonged. Bloody Sirius Black and his predatory smile. Bloody Sirius bloody Black with his terrible, knowing eyes.

He remembered Dumbledore saying, softly, disappointed: _Please explain why you didn’t tell me that Sirius was an Animagus._ He had stared down at his own hands, twisted them in his lap.

_You take it terribly hard._

Stupidly, childishly, he wanted to cry.

Sirius’s fingers on his shoulder. “Moony?” he said again.

“I ought to get to bed.” Remus could hear the slight slur in his voice. Sirius had been right, calling him awkward. He had said awkward things and he was awkward clambering to his feet, trying not to touch Sirius but not make it look as if he were trying not to touch Sirius. “I’m sorry,” he said, gesturing at the armoire. “I didn’t know. I thought it would be—”

But he couldn’t bear to think of what he had thought it would be, and he left the room without saying more. Sirius did not call him back.

* * *

The morning dawned eventually, as mornings did. Remus crawled out of bed and into the kitchen, where he found a note from Sirius that said _Have gone to the Ministry. Already told them you’re ill so don’t bother coming in. Make something nice for dinner._

Perhaps he should have felt angry about it, but all he could muster was gratitude. His bed was warm and soft, and he fell back asleep easily and was not plagued by dreams.

A Ministry owl woke him up as the sun was lengthening in his room, which meant it was getting on for supper time. He felt better. Lighter. Until he’d given himself a holiday—well, until Sirius had bullied him into taking a holiday—he hadn’t realized how exhausting the commission work was. Small wonder, with everything they had to read, all the stories they would know forever. Amos Diggory’s pink-cheeked face while he tortured Slytherins in front of their families. If they kept at it for months and months, Remus would have to remember to give himself a day here and there, to recover.

Very carefully, he did not think about last night. No part of it was safe. He did not think, while he was shopping at a Muggle grocery store and paying with Muggle money, of Sirius’s voice, scraping softly in the darkness while Remus’s fingers dug into his arm. He did not think, browning meat, of the planes of Sirius’s face, lit by flames. His weary dark eyes. What he had said, the way he had looked.

He did practice telling Harry the news. First what he had learned about Diggory. For all he knew, Harry would—

He couldn’t fool himself, not for a moment, into thinking that Harry might not mind. He could remember a raw-boned, adolescent boy, nearing his growth streak but not quite there, asking earnestly about James and Snape. Everyone nattered on about Lily’s eyes, but it was Lily’s heart that Remus saw, when he looked at the boy. Whatever it was inside Lily, that fire for justice, Harry had gotten that from her, along with his father’s bravery and hair and reckless admiration of Sirius.

Sirius was, Remus had to admit to himself, hard not to admire. Sometimes at school he had watched James watch Sirius, jealous of how simple it was for James, jealous of how much more Sirius cared about James’s opinion.

Harry got to Grimmauld Place before Sirius did. As if to bely Remus’s thoughts about him, he looked most exceptionally like James that day, the same agitated tilt to his chin as he tried to smooth down his hair from the breeze outside. “D’you know,” he said to Remus, indignant, “they’ve got us down there filling out papers and things, questionnaires, when there are dark wizards on the loose?”

“Terrible,” agreed Remus. He felt tremendously fond of the boy. How proud James would have been of him.

“Sirius said you’d got something to tell me.”

Remus sighed. “Let’s wait until—” he began. And then, “No, I’ll get it over, and then we can have a nice evening. Sit down, all right?”

Harry sat. His legs had gotten long. He was a man now, not a child. Sadly, Remus thought that Harry—more than himself, more than Sirius even—had never really had a chance to be a child.

“We got reports,” he said, “unfortunately, at the truth commission, that Amos Diggory—you remember. Cedric Diggory’s father.”

“Yes,” said Harry.

“During the war, he—you know that he’s a pureblood. Well, during the war, he caught Slytherins, sometimes, half-bloods or Slytherins with family who weren’t pureblood—and treated them—rather badly.” What an old man you sound like, Sirius would have said, if he had been there. “Tortured them,” Remus clarified.

Harry made a face, the kind of face that said _disgrace_ in an emphatic, disinterested way. The implications hadn’t struck him immediately, as they had Remus.

 _Molly Weasley knew,_ he tried to say, but the words were too bald-faced. Harry’s shoulders had relaxed, and he was running a finger along the grain of the wood in the table.

“Well,” Harry said bracingly, when Remus did not continue. “He was never much of a—I mean, it’s a surprise, obviously, but he was always a bit mental and—you know, he was horrible to Winky at the World Cup. Spose Kingsley’ll have to deal with it.”

“That’s not—” Remus shook his head, conscious that he was doing this badly. “You remember he’s in the— I went to Molly Weasley’s house, to tell her, because of their working together—”

“Oh hell,” said Harry. “Well, hell, what’s she meant to do now? Once she finds out, she’ll have to—”

“She already knew,” said Remus.

“—change the— What?”

Remus looked up at the ceiling, not to have to look at Harry’s eyes, Lily’s eyes, the bright green shock there. He could not help thinking that was what Lily must have looked like when Voldemort walked into her home, right before she had died for her son. He badly wished that he could think of something else. If she had lived, she would never have looked the other way about Amos Diggory. If she had lived, she would be drinking a butterbeer and chattering away to them both, leaned up against the refrigerator while James and Remus tried to sort out dinner.

“I’m sorry,” he said, finally, because Harry wasn’t saying anything.

“She knew that—” Harry began, and cut himself off. He tried again: “She knew when she started the group? Or she—during the war, you know, she couldn’t have, because, because the Weasleys were— I mean, she wasn’t sort of around London to—to know.” His voice trailed away. He looked lost, and shocked still.

Remus made himself meet Harry’s eyes. He had looked like this, betrayed like this, those years back in the fireplace at Grimmauld Place, asking about James.

“I’m not sure when she found out,” said Remus. “I don’t know the answer to that.”

Harry nodded, his gaze distant. Thinking of Hannah, Remus reached out and put a hand bracingly on Harry’s shoulder, squeezed it, just for a moment, then let go.

“We all did things during the war, Harry, that we’d like to have the chance to take back.”

“Yeah,” said Harry. “Yeah. Only, he’s not going to say that, is he? He’s not going to say that he’d like to take it back. He’ll—we’ve all heard him go on about Slytherins. Even Ron thinks it’s a bit much, and Ron’s—” Harry did not go on to say what Ron was. “God, I’ll have to tell Gin.”

 _She won’t believe you,_ thought Remus. It was the thought he always had for himself, when he told something to his friends they wouldn’t like. He wanted to protect Harry from it, to produce some incontrovertible proof about Molly, and about Diggory, that nobody would ever be able to deny.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to—” He waved a hand.

Harry managed a half smile before his gaze turned inward again. He looked older than his years, and weary. When was the last time Remus had seen him that he hadn’t looked tired? He was a child, and he should be able to rest.

“Anyway,” said Remus, in a clearing-up sort of voice, “I’ve done roasted chicken and veg, and I’ve got that cheesy bread Sirius likes. Dunno how well it goes with the other stuff, but he goes on and on if I don’t get it.”

After a long pause, in which Remus wondered whether he ought to have encouraged Harry to talk a bit more about Molly, Harry summoned up something close to a real smile and said, “Hermione would call him a spoiled child.”

“I do like the cheesy bread, mate,” said Remus. “If I’m honest.”

“Yeah, it’s well good,” Harry agreed.

Remus asked Harry to go fetch out some of the Muggle alcohol that was still in the parlour from the night Sirius had gotten Remus drunk. Harry came back with two bottles in each hand, laughing as if he were drunk already.

“What’ve you got all this for?” he said, through giggles. “Did Sirius buy this lot?”

“Take one guess,” said Remus. “Pass me one, yeah? That red one, I liked that. Just regular wine, but it’s quite nice. D’you want a glass? Sirius and I have both drunk directly from the bottles of all of these, and I know you Muggle-borns get squeamish about that.”

Harry passed Remus the wine bottle and set the other three down on the table to look at them appraisingly.

“Rum is horrible,” Remus advised. “The brown one.”

“I quite like rum.”

“Have it, then, get it out of the house. Well, check with Sirius first, he’s—”

A loud crack echoed out downstairs, and Harry said, “Talk of the devil” and then, when nothing followed but the sound of footsteps, “Oi, why’s Mrs. Black not having a go at him?”

“We got rid of her,” said Remus, not without pride.

“Good.” Harry twisted off the top of the rum bottle and had a sip, made a face, had another. “Jesus, what a month. Sirius, we’re in the kitchen!”

Sirius came clattering in, looking disgustingly cheerful and alert for how bleary Remus still felt. “Wotcher, mates. Do you—oh, all right, I see from the funereal look on Moony’s face that you’ve already sorted Harry out about Amos Diggory. Bloody awful load of shit, innit.”

“Will you—” Remus stopped the words on their way out. _Innit,_ as if Sirius were from—not that it mattered, it didn’t matter. He himself wasn’t from anywhere. Shropshire long enough to fix the way he spoke, and then every bloody place in England and a few in Scotland and Wales as well, anywhere his parents could hide him. He didn’t care. It didn’t matter.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “I didn’t—yeah.”

Sirius put a hand on Harry’s shoulder, and Harry heaved a sigh. They made a familiar picture, Potter and Black, and Remus was gripped by such a vicious envy that he had to turn back to his veg, stirring it unnecessarily around the pan.

“Giving the boy bad news before dinner,” said Sirius, bumping Remus’s shoulder on his way to wash his hands.

“Better to have it out first,” Remus said.

“D’you think?” Sirius tilted his head at Remus, very doglike and altogether too intent for a casual question.

Remus felt very fond of him. “Just tell me whatever it is.”

“Can’t be worse than—” Harry waved a hand. “Well, no, it probably could.”

“Could now that you’ve jinxed it,” said Remus lightly. “Look, spit it out, you look like a naughty child waiting to be punished.”

“Harry, mate, can you give us a second?”

Remus’s stomach lurched. As Harry got to his feet, Remus said, “No, it’s all right. I’d rather be finished with this so we can have a nice dinner. You don’t need to be so oracular, Sirius, you’re making it sound more dire than it ever possibly could be.”

“Greyback wants to see you.” Sirius paused, and added, “And I don’t think you should do it. I think you should let him rot in his fucking cell and die a painful fucking death.”

“No fear,” said Remus. He wondered if Sirius realized that the painful death he wanted for Greyback was the very one that would come, inevitably, for Remus as well. Bones that could no longer knit themselves back together. Organs that would not take the strain.

“He says he’ll testify,” Sirius said, “if you’ll be there when he does it.”

Ah. That, Remus really ought to have seen coming. He had heard enough stories to know that Greyback liked to have tabs on his victims. During the war, the first one, when he was not quite so well hidden, Remus had always expected Greyback to come knocking on his door someday, asking him or commanding him to throw his lot in with Voldemort’s werewolves. He supposed it had been fear of Dumbledore that kept Greyback away. Which no longer applied, of course.

Greyback called the werewolves he had sired his children. Remus thought of that more often than he would have liked.

“Well, you needn’t have made a production of it,” said Remus, resuming his unnecessary stirring of the veg. “If that’s what it takes to get him to say what he’s done, it’s what I’ll do. Can one of you have a look at the bread to make sure it’s not burning in there?”

Sirius, who liked it burned, opened the oven, then closed it. “Could do with a bit longer. Are you serious?”

Really, Remus thought, he should receive all his bad news with a child in the room. That Harry wasn’t a proper child didn’t seem to matter. It would be irresponsible of him to make a fuss with Harry in the room, and so he didn’t. He didn’t even have the inclination for it. He felt cool and unbothered; he felt the way Sirius had always looked when they were at Hogwarts.

“Yes, quite serious,” he said. “He wants me to come and shock everybody with what he’s done, and make it seem like werewolves are dangerous halfbreeds, well, let him try it. _I_ haven’t bitten anyone in human form—or wolf form, come to that—or eaten raw meat in a public square or whatever else Fenrir Greyback thinks is so killingly original about himself.”

Sirius was staring at him; Remus couldn’t read his thoughts in his face.

“Well,” Remus said, “I haven’t. This lot’s done, we’re only waiting for the bread.” He sat down at the table, rather decidedly. From the oven, he could feel Sirius’s eyes still on him, but he didn’t turn to look.

“Do you not worry,” Sirius began.

Harry made a face at him.

Remus laughed. “It’s all right. Look, let’s not schedule him near wolf night, but aside from that I don’t see that any fuss has to be made about it. Do I not worry what?” and he turned around and looked full at Sirius, who held his eyes so long and so intently that it felt like a physical touch.

“People can be horrible,” said Sirius. “That’s all. I don’t want them being horrible to you.”

“It would hardly be the first time.” The timer dinged for the bread. “There,” said Remus, “that’s as good a sign as any that we ought to stop discussing terrible things, and get on with having a nice evening.”

* * *

Later that night, when Harry had gone home and Remus was reading in the parlour, Sirius came slinking in, so soft-footed that he might as well have been his dog self. He settled himself on the floor in front of the other end of the couch, twiddling a wooden ladle between his fingers and casting furtive, sideways looks at Remus.

After five minutes of this, Remus said, “What, Pads?”

“Nothing,” said Sirius.

Five more minutes of twiddling and sideways glances passed. Remus put his book down beside him. “Padfoot, _what?_ You keep looking at me like you think I’m going to burst into tears.”

“Are you?”

“No. What, because of Greyback?”

With surprising frankness, Sirius said, “You’ve got me a bit worried, going all serene about this. I thought you’d be gnashing your teeth and, I dunno, getting drunk again. You weren’t very hilarious about his getting captured.”

This was so inescapably true that Remus let himself consider the matter with some seriousness before answering. “I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t. I didn’t want to—to go into a decline in front of Harry, or anything, but I’m not—it’s not having the same—” He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. “I suppose—when I’ve heard about him. Stories and things. What he’s said to other werewolves, when he’s bitten them, or afterward, or to other werewolves he hadn’t got anything to do with.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he’s always been lying, hasn’t he? Saying what a blessing it is to be a werewolf, how lucky we all are. So much bloody better than humans because we turn into mindless, vicious animals once a month, that whole line of talk. And the way he’s never had to—actually pay attention to the fact that he’s hurt us.”

Sirius scooted a little closer to Remus’s knees. Remus suppressed a mad urge to cup Sirius’s cheek in his hand. Being the undisputed object of Sirius’s attention took him this way, sometimes.

“But this.” Remus sighed. “Maybe it’s stupid, but—knowing he’ll be sat there, listening to what everyone else has said about him. D’you know what I mean? He’ll have to—maybe it won’t make any difference at all—”

“I don’t think it will,” said Sirius, very gently.

“—yeah, well, even if it doesn’t, he’ll have to—he’ll hear the words being said. He won’t be able to avoid that bit. And I’ll hate seeing him, I’ll—” For the first time, Remus thought of Greyback’s face. The thought made him feel icy cold, and he pushed it away. “I’ll hate it. You’re right that I’ll hate it. But it’ll be good that it happened, and I can—for fucking once, I can make him do what I want him to do, instead of the other way round.”

Still twiddling the ladle, Sirius angled his face away. Remus nudged his shoulder with one knee.

“Oi.”

“Yeah,” said Sirius.

“What?” said Remus.

“Nothing.” Sirius’s voice was innocent. “What what? I’m only—”

“ _Sirius._ ”

“Yeah, fine.” Sirius turned back, his face tipped up to Remus’s. “Could I, would it be all right if—” He looked young. Remus’s heart ached. More firmly, Sirius went on, “I’m coming with you. When he—whatever he’s going to say. I’m coming with you to hear it.”

 _What did you do with the room I made you?_ Remus thought. _Did you burn it too?_ He knew that Sirius hadn’t; he knew that Sirius burning the armoire had had nothing to do with him and his gift and everything to do with Walburga Black. But still, the thought stung him like poison. He said, coolly, “All right, if you want to.”

Sirius nodded and said “All right,” but the moment was spoiled, and Remus knew he had been the one to spoil it.

* * *

At the Ministry, everyone treated Remus like he was made of glass, which he supposed was Sirius’s doing or Pomona’s or both. Layla was painstakingly polite, and the Healer didn’t speak to him at all, addressing any problems that might have fallen into his purview to one of the junior commission employees. Remus supposed that he owed her an apology.

Wolf night was coming. He did not have to tell the commission not to schedule Greyback’s statement for a wolf night. By now they all knew the dates of the full moon. Pomona had pulled Remus aside the month before and told him not to come in the day following, or the day after that, if he wasn’t up to it.

“With all the time Trish takes for her work,” she said, “or me for mine, it’s the least you should do.”

It reminded him that he had meant to hunt down some Wolfsbane potion. On his lunch hour, he took himself down to Imports and Exports and made inquiries. The single wizard on staff there didn’t seem very well-informed about the regulations specific to Wolfsbane, but he shrank away from Remus as if lycanthropy might be contagious. Remus wondered if they could spare Wolfsbane for Greyback on wolf night. Might be worth it, for the peace of mind it would give everyone, no matter how scarce the potion was at St. Mungo’s.

Greyback agreed to give a statement the week following wolf night, 21 September.

Meantime, Amos Diggory began sending angry owls to the commission and to Remus personally, at Grimmauld Place. Remus suspected Sirius of intercepting some of them.

“We’re not answering,” said Layla. There were bags under her eyes. Remus had tried to tell her to take a holiday, but she snapped at him that if he could be lackadaisical about his work, she certainly couldn’t.

Jack tapped his little finger against his desk. “Not even to say—”

“Go back to work, Jack,” Layla said, so wearily that it didn’t even sound like a joke.

Diggory didn’t go to the press—“because he knows they’ll report it out, and find out what he did,” said Jack with a touching amount of faith in the _Prophet_ ’s ability to engage in journalism—but other people did. Ministry employees, mostly, and parents of students. Kingsley came down to their office looking solemn and inquired if they were certain they were using their resources to best effect.

To Remus’s surprise, it was not Layla but Pomona who seemed ready to go for his throat over this. “Are we independent?” she demanded.

“Yes,” said Kingsley. “Of course, Pomona.”

“If you’re going to come down here and tell us who we are and aren’t supposed to speak to about their war crimes, Kingsley, then you may wish to go back to calling me Professor.” Pomona’s hands were on her hips, and her hat was a little askew. Remus could have kissed her.

Kingsley smiled. “Perhaps war crimes is a little—”

Layla’s head snapped up, but Jack was already there. “Unforgivable Curses are in the Ministry’s charter, Minister, as a particular type of crime. I would be happy to look up the verbiage, but we’re all aware that they carry mandatory sentences in Azkaban. Are you suggesting that we ignore those crimes?”

“Not at all,” said Kingsley. “But there’s a question of priorities.”

Shaking a little, Remus said, “We’ve been sending letters to everyone who’s named in testimony. Nobody’s being charged with anything, Kingsley.”

Kingsley had the look of a man who would you correct you into saying _Minister._

“It’s the very opposite,” said Layla. “They’re being given the opportunity to counter the allegations made against them. This woman who insists that her son has been—what did she say?”

“Tarred and feathered,” Remus offered.

“Tarred and feathered, thank you.” Layla tossed her quill down onto her desk. “We haven’t released a report yet, Minister. They’ve elected to go to the _Prophet_ with this rather than come down here and give their testimony. Which they’ve every right to do, but I don’t see that it remotely suggests bias on our part.”

“That’s right,” said Remus firmly.

Kingsley gave Remus a look he couldn’t read. He supposed after their time in the Order, Kingsley wasn’t accustomed to seeing Remus firm. _You take it terribly hard,_ Sirius had said. As if Remus didn’t already know that his desire to be liked—not that, respected, loved—was the worst thing about him.

“We were assured of our independence,” Remus said.

“Do we still have that assurance, Minister?” said Layla.

“The question I asked was about resources.” Kingsley clasped his hands together. “The resources we have made available—”

“Minister, please forgive me.” Layla’s jaw was tense, and Remus remembered that when she was not working on this commissioner, she worked for the Ministry. For Kingsley. “But can we have your assurance that this commission remains independent?”

Kingsley sighed. “I haven’t said anything to suggest—”

“If it doesn’t,” said Remus, who had spent most of his life with nothing to lose and who now did not feel he had made the most of that fact, “if there is to be Ministry interference—”

“Certainly the commission remains independent,” Kingsley said in his deep, reassuring voice. “My question was whether the commission felt that it was using its resources to best effect. It is a question that has now arisen in several meetings. I should like to hear an answer that I can bring back to the rest of my staff.”

Pomona was still angry. “Kingsley—Minister. Each of us, with the possible exception of Trish, who is badly needed at St. Mungo’s as you’ll be aware, has been working forty to seventy hours each week. The ten employees we were assigned have comparable workloads, which is why we applied for five additional support staff, and we’ve hired a Muggle expert in data management to—” She glanced at Layla for help.

“Well, really, Minister, the extent that we’re behind the times in efficiencies in that regard is shocking,” said Layla. “Hannah Waterfield has made it possible to get some sense of the scope of what we’re looking at. Here.” She unrolled Hannah’s magical parchment, muttered some spells at it, and got it to show a complex and unreadably tiny graph. “We’ve asked her to categorize the _types_ of stories people have been telling us, which is its own endeavor, but as you’ll see—” She waved her wand again.

The graph vanished, replaced by a series of circles with words inside them, some enormous and some tiny. _Torture,_ said one of the larger ones. _Loss of wand to Ministry,_ said another one. Other circles said _sexual assault_ and _death of nuclear family member_ and _witness to murder._ Remus’s eye caught on quite a small circle that said _forcible conversion to lycanthropy._

Kingsley stroked his chin.

“That isn’t to mention,” Layla went on, “several of our employees bringing on their partners to assist us, which they needn’t have done at all.”

She meant Sirius, as well as Tonks. A shiver traveled all the way down Remus’s spine. _Stupid stupid stupid,_ he berated himself. It was the last thing he should have cared about just now.

Kingsley stepped forward and touched Hannah’s data parchment. “Remarkable,” he said, and everyone in the room relaxed visibly.

“Thank you.” Kingsley turned to face them. “This has been a great help. I apologize for disturbing you in your workday.”

When the door swung shut behind him, Layla sat sharply down at her desk and began writing furiously.

“What’s that for then?” said Jack.

Layla kept scribbling. “We ought to apply for special permission for Hannah Waterfield to retain her knowledge of the wizarding world after the commission’s over. We ought to do it now, while Minister Shacklebolt is impressed with her. Blast, I’ve written his name instead of hers. Remus, hand me over a fresh piece of parchment.”

Remus gave her one. He felt terribly fond of her, of them all. This morning he had come in to find that one of the statement-takers, a Slytherin boy called Clayborn, had left a cupcake on his desk with a note that said his uncle had been killed by Fenrir Greyback and he was sorry. Pomona had told him quite fiercely that she would be happy to take a dose of Polyjuice Potion and sit in on Greyback’s testimony on Remus’s behalf. If Sirius ever found out that Remus had said no, he would be furious.

 _Several of our employees bringing on their partners,_ Remus thought. He thought _partners_ over and over again.

* * *

September 21st was hot, after weeks and weeks of cold weather. The abrupt change made Remus’s bones ache, and he hoped it did the same to Fenrir Bloody Greyback. He woke up suffused with dread and in vicious pain from the heat, and he snapped at Sirius for trying to give him tea. Sirius, who should have snapped back at him, just stared at him with a face full of pity. He didn’t need pity. He needed this day to be over.

They had arranged to do it down in the dungeons, less because they cared about the impressive surroundings and more in deference to security concerns. The oldest of the statement-takers, a Ministry employee of thirty years’ standing who had come on in the second wave of commission employees, would be taking Greyback’s statement.

“I’ll be here the whole time,” Sirius kept telling Remus.

Remus kept biting back snide remarks, because Sirius meant it kindly, meant it for protection and comfort and not—whatever this was, this feeling that he was being laid bare in front of everyone who remotely respected him in the wizarding world. _Weak, they’ll see you weak, and they’ll know,_ said his mind, vicious. Remus forced it back. He managed a smile at Sirius and did not shrink away from Jack’s friendly clap on the shoulder, or the warmth of Pomona’s eyes. He managed, he was managing.

Greyback was twenty minutes late. Even knowing that it must be the prison’s fault and not Greyback’s, Remus was dizzy with resentment. When they Apparated him in, from a chair identical to the one in the dungeon so that there would be no moment that he wasn’t in chains, his face was already turned toward Remus. As if he had known, somehow, where Remus would be sitting.

Remus didn’t look at him. He kept his eyes trained on the statement-taker, Vale. He could smell Greyback, or perhaps that was his imagination. Greyback smelled like fresh blood and cold earth, like the metal of chains when you had woken up from a wolf night and you were frightened and nobody was there and you were alone and would always be alone.

Sirius’s fingers closed around Remus’s.

“—to answer charges made against you,” Vale was saying calmly. As if there were not a wolf in the room, a predator who would devour them all.

“But I haven’t said hello to my boy,” said Fenrir Greyback.

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Sirius was holding Remus’s hand tight enough to hurt.

Remus said, “You don’t have any children, Mr. Greyback, and certainly none in this room.”

He had his eyes on the front of the room, on Vale and Vale’s bodyguard—they had sent a guard for each of the commission employees in attendance—and so he didn’t see what Sirius did. But Sirius did something, because Greyback laughed.

“Your friend doesn’t think so,” Greyback said, still laughing. “Your friend knows what you are. How beautifully I made you.”

Remus’s free hand went to his shoulder. The scar running down his chest that he never let anyone see. He hadn’t meant to touch it; the movement was involuntary. He wanted to scream out his fury with himself for forgetting to keep still. Instead he turned his head, just enough to see Greyback. He kept his eyes cold, his face calm. “If you wouldn’t mind listening to our employee before you begin.”

 _Are you proud of me,_ he wanted to ask, but he didn’t look at Sirius to find out. Sirius was holding his hand, and it was Greyback who would see if Remus was weak. Greyback who would turn his yellow eyes on Sirius.

Vale kept talking. Greyback kept looking at Remus. When he caught Remus’s eye, once, he gave him a slow and knowing smile. _My boy._ Remus’s own father, Lyall, was long dead, and he had died disappointed, without finding a cure for his son. Without restoring Remus to humanity. The werewolf representative.

He would not shudder. He would not flinch away.

Because Greyback had been free so long, and captured so publicly, the commission had rushed through any testimony that pointed to him, in order to give him a chance to respond before he was (it was generally assumed) executed. There was a long list of crimes with which he was to be confronted, and Vale read them out slowly, along with the names of those who had accused him. The fools. The fools to give Greyback a map to their doors. Fools to trust in the Ministry to protect them.

Greyback denied nothing. Vale would read a charge: _That you bit Bill Weasley while in human form, infecting him with a low-grade lycanthropy that persists to this day._ And Greyback would say: “Yes.” And he would say: “Human blood tastes the sweetest in a human mouth.” And he would say: “Isn’t that right, my boy?”

And he would look at Remus, and smile.

 _I didn’t,_ thought Remus. I never did. He wanted to stop the quill that was taking down every word, and make it record that he had never done that, never bitten anyone, nobody ever, not even as a joke, not even during sex, never. But he did not let any of it show on his face. He would keep himself steady if it killed him.

Greyback smelled like a wolf night. Irrationally, Remus thought that he was doing it on purpose.

Sirius was holding his hand.

“Yes,” said Greyback.

Vale’s voice was even, and the quill wrote down everything.

“Yes,” Greyback said. “All of it, and more that they won’t admit to.”

There was a lantern on the wall, the third left from the door where they would have brought Greyback in if he had been a normal criminal, whose light flickered. Remus kept his eyes fixed on it. The light cast jumping patterns on the wall, and nearly died, and nearly died, and did not die. Remus had been in this dungeon, he thought, for hours and hours, and he would be here hours longer.

Greyback said, “Hardly a crime if she liked the taste of his pain.”

Sirius was holding his hand.

Greyback had yellow eyes, and his fingernails were grown long like talons. His face was all matted hair; Remus tried to tell himself that it was pitiful, how hard Greyback tried to look like a wolf.

“Not much longer,” Sirius leaned forward to say in his ear.

Greyback heard him. He turned his mad, jeering face to Remus again, and he said, “I thought you were pleased to see me.”

“Over the moon,” said Remus. The tone was right, that Sirius-Black-posh-lad bored-to-death voice, but he was shaking, and Greyback saw.

“Will someone fetch my boy a glass of water,” Greyback said.

“No,” said Sirius.

Remus could see how it would continue from there: Greyback insisting, and Sirius objecting because it was Greyback who had said it, and Greyback would win because they needed him to continue to testify. They needed his words on the record. He didn’t need anything from them, only the chance to make Remus—

To remind Remus—

Well, he was reminded. He cast a Summoning Charm for his glass in the office, and filled it with another charm. He toasted Greyback and drank it down, as if he could not feel Greyback’s eyes on his throat as he swallowed. Sirius was holding his hand, and it hurt. How clearly they must all see what he was, with Greyback there in front of them.

 _Yes_ to attacking a five-year-old whose mother would not help the Death Eaters. _Yes_ to assisting Death Eaters to walk into Hogwarts and maim and murder. _Yes_ to turning three Ravenclaws into werewolves in that last year of Voldemort’s reign, when the Death Eaters held the school. _Yes_ to the murder of Ted Tonks.

Yes to everything. Yes like drumbeats. Remus’s bones ached.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed. At some point much later, he looked up and Greyback was gone. He didn’t believe that Greyback would have left without some parting shot to him, and he couldn’t remember hearing it, or whether he had responded. Sirius was still holding his hand.

“I need the loo,” he said. His voice sounded odd, as if it were happening outside of his body. The cool wood of his seat’s armrest, as he levered himself standing, felt strange too; the way his feet received the weight of his body at every step. How odd to live inside a body. How far away one could feel from it.

The loo was, blessedly, empty. Remus walked to the far end of it and rested his head against the cool of the tile. He felt like an empty house, Grimmauld Place before the Order had gotten to it. He closed his hands into fists and pressed them into his eye sockets. He thought of the scar on his chest. Nobody had seen it but his parents and his Healers, not ever. The fat, white, uneven edges of it.

Greyback smiled at him.

This he remembered: bruises on his wrists afterward, which his mother had cried over, and he hadn’t understood why. He thought perhaps it was something he’d done wrong. One night he’d heard her crying about it, talking to his father: _What else is there, what else,_ she wept, and Remus had thought for years that there was something else yet to come, that his parents knew about and hadn’t told him, some secondary contagion that would make him even more of a monster than he already was.

Remus had gotten into the habit, those weeks after, of circling his right hand around his left wrist, which looked the worst, a yellow-green mess that faded to purple and then red but seemed to last, in one colour or another, forever. His right hand wasn’t big enough to hide all the bruising. He had never lost the habit of it, and it was a comfort now, the loose touch of his own fingers against the delicate skin of his wrist.

Greyback smiled. His teeth were like fangs.

Did his own smile look like that? Was that what they saw, other wizards, when they looked at him? The nonhuman representative.

Hands closed over his shoulders from behind. Remus snarled like a wolf—he was a wolf, he _was_ a wolf—and hurled himself backward hard, slamming whoever-it-was back into the porcelain sink. They swore, and let go of him. Remus spun himself around, wand out.

“Only me,” Sirius said. His teeth were bloody where the back of Remus’s head had banged into his mouth.

“Oh. I—Padfoot, I’m—” Sorry didn’t mean anything between them, anymore. Instead, uselessly, he said, “I didn’t know it was you.”

“Ow. Fuck. Ow. You’re strong.” Sirius sounded surprised to discover it.

“Wolf,” Remus reminded him, and his voice did not tremble over the word.

“Bugger that,” said Sirius. “You know you didn’t really hurt me, you scrawny git. You caught me off guard, that’s all.”

As a wolf, he wasn’t scrawny. As a wolf, he was powerful. Deep-chested. Teeth that would go easily into human flesh, tear a life apart. As fast as that.

Greyback smiled at him, and a part of Remus, buried not all that deep down, wanted to tuck his tail (he didn’t have a tail) and tilt up his muzzle (he didn’t have a muzzle) and submit. If his parents could see him, they—

“Moony,” said Sirius, very gentle.

Remus opened his eyes. (When had he closed them?) “I didn’t know it was you,” he said again.

“I know that.” Sirius reached out and touched his wrist again, lightly. “Does this still help,” he said, cradling Remus’s hand in both of his and rubbing his thumbs over the pulse point.

_”Does this help?” Sirius asked him, leaning forward to concentrate, his long hair tickling against Remus’s nose. His knees dug painfully into Remus’s thigh. In the morning there would be a bruise, and Remus would press his fingers into it._

_“Yes,” said Remus._

_Sirius looked up. Their faces were close. Remus would barely have had to move, to kiss him._

“I don’t remember him biting me,” said Remus. “It isn’t as if seeing him—”

“Shut up, Moony.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Moony,” said Sirius. “Shut. Up.”

Remus shut up and let Sirius touch him like they were back in the Gryffindor common room, tantalizing, never enough. If Sirius could have gotten closer and closer and closer, if he could have climbed inside Remus’s skin entire, even that might not have been enough. Remus liked the idea of having a whole person inside his messy, ruined body. What a miracle it would be. What a novelty.

Sirius had cold hands, and they concentrated Remus’s mind wonderfully.

He was so tired.

Greyback smiled at him.

His head tipped forward to rest on Sirius’s shoulder. Sirius didn’t shake him off. His thumbs kept moving, one rubbing across the veins on Remus’s wrist, the other pressing in and in against the beat of his pulse. Remus closed his eyes.

“Do you think,” he whispered.

“No,” said Sirius, fierce and fast.

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“Yes I do.” Sirius bent his head down and nudged his forehead against Remus’s nose. “You were going to say, do I think he could tell something about you. Something bad. That made him turn you instead of kill you.”

Remus clenched his jaw.

The next thing he knew, Sirius was hugging him angry-tight. “You fucking idiot. You utter shit, of _course_ he couldn’t. He’s a, he’s—he’s some horrible, squalid nothing of a person and biting people makes him feel big and strong and there isn’t anything else to it. You were a way of getting at your father, it was bloody awful and I’d kill him for it if I could but you are nothing nothing nothing like him. D’you hear me, _nothing._ ” His fingers dug into Remus’s shoulders like an anchor.

Merlin, he felt—not good, exactly, in Sirius’s arms, but contained. Under control. He wished and wished that he could stay.


	8. Chapter 8

**Excerpted from Witness Testimony Archives for the Commission of Inquiry into the Wizarding Wars, 1978–1998**

**Statement Taker:** Ernie McMillan  
**Date:** 28 June 2000  
**Witness:** [confidential until party comes of age] (age 14)

I’ve—my mum says I shouldn’t say this bit. She says it’s not right to cause more trouble for the Chosen One, for Mr. Potter. And I’ve not been sure if I’m meant to sort of—well, it’s Death Eaters who were the real baddies, isn’t it? Everyone knows that. Not Harry Potter, d’you know what I mean?

Nobody’s talked about it since then, and loads of us were there. And the reason I—what I’ve said, all that stuff about the professors the last year before Professor McGonagall became the headmistress— They half-killed one of our prefects that year. They did it in front of the first-years, because she’d been protecting one of us about—well, I don’t want to say what it was, but one of us had done something they’d said we weren’t to do. And the Carrows made us all come out to one of the greenhouses, dunno why it was there they decided on, and they cast Cruciatus on Maya until she couldn’t talk properly. They stopped the spell, and she couldn’t stand up or speak, she was crying so hard. Horrible, it was.

Yeah, s’pose I should have. I forgot. It sounds stupid, but—well, that wasn’t something that happened to me, was it? It was something that happened, that’s all. It happened and I was there. I wasn’t the one who—d’you know what I mean, they weren’t trying to get at me, doing that to Maya. So I didn’t think to tell you.

Anyway, what I—we all thought they’d kill her, or drive her mad like Neville Longbottom’s mum and dad, cause they were always talking about that, the Carrows. And they’d said it wasn’t going to stop until somebody said what they’d done. They said they’d finish with Maya and start on another one of us, and they—ages and ages, it went on.

Ezra spoke up in the end, said it was him. They took him away and he came back a week later with bloody great welts all down his back, and wouldn’t say where he’d been. But the thing is, we all thought it was An—someone else. Not Ezra at all. He wouldn’t say so, but we all did think he was only saying that because he couldn’t take it anymore. Watching her scream.

Anyway. That’s why I wanted to—that’s why.

* * *

In the week after Greyback’s testimony, Sirius treated Remus like he might run mad at any moment. There was a delay on Hannah’s paperwork, which had Tonks in a tailspin about their future; Remus ran into Molly Weasley coming into work, and Molly refused to speak to him; and the four centaurs who had agreed to come in and give witness statements recanted under pressure from their respective communities.

Remus didn’t tell any of this to Sirius. He told him about victories: The kid who sent an owl thanking them for caring about Slytherins (which had Jack in tears, and even Layla blinking more than usual). The Hogwarts house-elves, with whom Remus had met three times, who finally agreed to come in and tell their stories. Sirius listened to these stories and responded with the appropriate enthusiasm, and Remus could not tell if it was his own paranoia making him think that Sirius was humoring him.

Then a Ravenclaw girl in her third year at Hogwarts testified that she had seen Harry Potter perform the Cruciatus Curse on Amycus Carrow before the Battle of Hogwarts.

Hannah brought it to him directly, so obviously expecting the best of Remus that he felt sick. _You take it terribly hard,_ he remembered Sirius saying. “It showed up in our database,” she said, “and ordinarily we’d just—send the letter. The owl. But I wasn’t—” She shoved tendrils of loose hair back from her face. “I wanted to bring it to you.”

“During the war,” Remus began, and he stopped himself.

“I know,” said Hannah. She was very steady, saying it. She had been steady all this time. She was good, and expected Remus to be good too.

“I’m,” said Remus. “I’m very tired of—” Excuses. “It’s only that I taught him. He’s a child, he’s been a child this whole time when—”

“It doesn’t mean that he’s—” Hannah looked up, searching for the words. “He’ll come in and speak about it, and— It’s one choice among a thousand.”

“No, I know. It’s—we’ll bring it to the group, I suppose.”

Of all people, Layla took it the worst. When Remus had finished, she sank back into her chair, gripping the armrest so tightly that it whitened her knuckles. Jack said, “Fuck,” and Pomona’s eyes were bright with tears, but Layla looked desolate. She looked finished.

“I suppose,” said the Healer. Trish. “I suppose that we—should ask him in?”

They all looked at Layla.

“What,” she said, her voice all edges. “Why are you looking at me? Do you want my permission to bury it? All right, you have my permission. I’ve worked, we’ve all worked, it’s been months already and it’ll be months from now, and I have every expectation that it will be for nothing if the wizarding world thinks we’re going after The Boy Who Lived.”

Hannah said, “I don’t have a vote here—”

“Of course you have a vote,” said Layla. “I don’t want to hear you say that again. Your work has been more valuable to the commission than any two of us combined, and you’re the only Muggle perspective we’ll have in all of this.” 

Hannah blinked.

Layla said, “Don’t make that face. We’ll vote. There’s nothing else to be done. Harry Potter wasn’t underage at the time of this alleged incident, which means that the rules of our commission would stipulate that we give him the chance to respond. All in favour.”

There was a long, ugly silence.

_You take it terribly hard._

Finally, Remus said, “Will it not delegitimize the work we’ve been doing if—”

Trish said, “I think it would. If.”

Layla tipped her head down so that her hair fell forward to hide her face. If she agreed with them, she wasn’t showing it; and they were all waiting for her. She had been the one, all along, who kept them honest.

“I vote no,” said Jack.

They all looked at him.

“It’s one curse,” he said. “In the heat of battle, against a Death Eater we know was using Cruciatus against kids all year. If that bastard got a taste of his own medicine, I call it bloody good riddance. I won’t say what I wanted to do to the Carrows when I heard what they’d got up to.”

Remus thought of sitting next to Sirius while the armoire burned. He thought of Sirius’s hand tight around his.

Sirius would never forgive him. At any other time in Remus’s life, that would have been enough to decide him. But then—but the way Hannah had looked at him in the hallway. The boy who had left the cupcake, whose uncle had been killed. Everything Layla had done, every word she had said about the Order of the Phoenix. His student, Emily, whose life he had saved by teaching her Shield Charms.

“I vote yes. In favour,” he said.

“And me,” said Hannah.

Trish said, “I’m in favour.”

Remus looked at Pomona, who had taught Harry as well, and taught him for longer. She was crying. “Yes,” she said.

“There we have it,” said Layla. “We’ll ask him in. Whatever that—means, or wherever it takes us. That’s the decision.” Her voice lacked its customary crispness. She sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “Hannah, if you wouldn’t mind telling the staff.”

Sensible, to send Hannah. It would be easy for Hannah, who had not spent the last nearly-twenty years knowing Harry Potter’s name, to be the one to relay the decision. It would not weigh so heavy on her heart. _One decision among a thousand,_ she had said.

“I’ve got to go home,” Remus said. “I should—I’ll need to tell Sirius before he finds out from somebody else.” His voice sounded curiously normal.

Layla didn’t look up at him as he went. Not until later, when he was standing on the steps of Grimmauld Place trying to think of how he would break the news to Sirius, did Remus realize that she had not, in the end, voted.

He nearly knocked. When he told Sirius, he thought it fairly likely that Sirius would tell him to leave, take his things and get out of Grimmauld Place. At least he had money for a flat, now. At least he had set fire to Walburga Bloody Black when he had the chance.

“Sirius,” he called from the entry hall. Calling attention to the fact that Walburga’s portrait was gone. He knew it was cheap, but he couldn’t stop himself from doing it.

There was a pounding from above—Sirius never could move around a house at a normal speed or volume—and then Sirius came into view, his voice cheerful. “Come round for lunch? I think we’ve got—what’s the matter?”

“Nice being able to stand in the foyer,” said Remus.

Sirius, rightly, ignored this. “What is it?”

_I cannot bear it if you hate me._

“We—there was a report, at the commission today. Or, I mean, it was a statement from—it was a few days old, but Hannah and her lot only got to it today, so—you know how it is, the backlog of everyone who’s been coming in—”

“Yes.”

“Well, it.” Remus couldn’t make his mouth form the words.

Sirius crossed the foyer and put his hands on Remus’s shoulders. “You look awful,” he said gently.

“Someone’s made an allegation against Harry.”

“I see.” He let go of Remus and backed away, just enough for it to be noticeable. After an achingly long moment, he said, “Tell me again?”

As if once hadn’t been impossible. “There’s been, in the witness statements, an allegation against Harry. A Ravenclaw student. They’ve said Harry used _Cruciatus_ in their presence, before the Battle of Hogwarts.”

Sirius nodded. Whatever he was thinking, Remus could not make it out from the look on his face.

“Padfoot,” he said.

“Padfoot,” Sirius echoed. “Yes, we’re old school friends. I hadn’t forgotten.”

Remus looked away, but not quickly enough to miss Sirius’s glass shard of a smile. Sirius said, “Do you summon everyone in, who’s named in witness statements? No matter how—do you bring everyone in?”

Remus said, “Yes.”

“Was there a vote on it?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t mean on the general principle.”

“I know.”

“I meant was there a vote on whether you would bring in Harry.”

“Yes,” said Remus.

Sirius nodded. “Did your side win?”

When Remus had imagined this conversation—obsessively, he’d taken the Tube home and rehearsed it in his head all the way—he’d thought that Sirius would be angry. He hadn’t imagined that Sirius would—would do this, try to find him a way out of it, a way to say that it wasn’t his fault. Briefly, he considered lying.

He said, “Yes.”

Sirius flexed out his fingers. Since Azkaban, the cold made them ache, and they were always cold. Remus had thought of (sometimes he thought of nothing else but this) taking Sirius’s cold hands in his, rubbing his fingers warm. (Kissing him, kissing him.) Now he had to stop himself from imagining a blow. Bony, scarred knuckles against his bony, scarred chin.

He would deserve it, wouldn’t he?

Sirius had always been able to read his mind. “I’m not going to hit you, fuck’s sake, Moony.”

“It won’t be much,” said Remus. There was a thin whine of desperation in his own voice. Back at the Ministry, he had been so sure. “He—it won’t be for more than one spell.”

Sirius said, “Don’t you suppose there will be people there, to see him talk about it? Don’t you think there’s a possibility it will be a bit of a spectacle? The Chosen One, the savior of the wizarding world, being made to talk about how he saved every bloody person there to gawk at him?”

Remus looked over at him. Sirius had hunched his shoulders a little. Oh, God, how could he have been so stupid? Of course Sirius would remember— Of course he would think—

“It won’t be anything like your trial,” he said. Sirius scoffed. “It won’t be _anything_ like that, I wouldn’t—”

“No,” said Sirius bitterly. “It won’t be his own friends and teachers standing there in judgment. It won’t be everyone he knows despising him because it’s become expedient—because you’ll have _made_ it expedient—to despise him. It won’t be articles in the _Prophet,_ the moral downfall of a hero, as if he hasn’t had enough of that already.”

Remus remembered James and Lily’s funeral. Harry wasn’t there, nor Sirius, nor Peter. None of the people who had loved them best, except for Remus, and Remus couldn’t cry. He couldn’t even cry for them. He could barely think of them. He had been thinking about Sirius, laughing while they came to take him away to Azkaban. Laughing when he reached up and kissed Remus on the grotty old sofa after a mission. As they lowered James and Lily into the ground, Remus only had room to wonder what was so wrong with him that he could have loved someone who would do this. What he could have missed. He wondered it so hard that he missed his chance to say _Amen,_ or take a rose from one of the lavish bouquets.

“Well,” said Sirius.

“I wanted to come and tell you,” Remus said. “Before—or rather, in case it was in the paper.”

Sirius made a noise that Remus could not interpret. He said, “Good of you.”

Unable to help himself, Remus shifted his weight forward slightly, towards Sirius, thinking that he would touch his shoulder or his hand, the kind of harmless touch that a friend might do. But Sirius moved too, a small and precise step back and away.

Remus swallowed a lump in his throat. He hadn’t wanted Sirius to rage at him—of course he hadn’t—but at least he would have understood rage. This stillness frightened him. “I knew you’d be angry, but I think—Sirius, I thought and thought about it, and I don’t see how there’s anything else I could have done.”

“Lily,” said Sirius, each word as precise as his flinch away from Remus had been, “died for him. You couldn’t think of absolutely anything else?”

Lily’s name steadied him. He and Lily had gotten to be friends long before she was ever willing to give James a second look: first quarreling over the same books in the library until Madame Pince shooed them both out, then quizzing each other before tests in the classes they shared. She was the first person Remus came out to. Lily was good in the instinctive way that Harry was, but without the brashness and the anger. Lily was righteous in battle. Her voice was never so clear or so strong as it was when she was defending what she knew was right.

(If he had spent more time with her, and less with Sirius and Peter and James, Remus wondered if it would have rubbed off on him. That energy for the fight. That certainty.)

Lily would have sent the letter. To her own husband, to her own son. Yes, she would have.

“We’ve got to rebuild,” Remus said. “Sirius, we _have_ to, or there’s no way forward from here, and we can’t do it if the foundations are rotten.”

To that, Sirius said absolutely nothing. His eyes were dark as the bleakest midnight. When Remus could take the silence no longer, he said, “I’ll understand if you want me to—if you’re angry, and you don’t want to have me live here anymore.” He could hear how far he was falling short of the businesslike tone he intended.

Sirius didn’t answer.

“I can get a flat, now. I’ve got the money.”

Nothing. Sirius was so still he might have been under Petrificus Totalus.

“All right,” said Remus, quietly. “I suppose I should have done this differently. I’ll be at Tonks’s tonight, and then—I’ll tell you where I’m going to be after that. So that if you need to you can find me.”

Sirius fetched out his wand in a motion so fast that Remus had not yet begun to brace for an attack before a loud _crack!_ echoed in the foyer, and Sirius vanished. Remus was left alone with the charred remains of Mrs. Black’s portrait, and a fading certainty that he was choosing the right things.

* * *

The next day, when Tonks and Hannah and Remus all went into work together braced for disaster, Sirius did not come home. Or if he did come home, he was not there when Remus stopped by, gingerly expecting the fight that had not materialized the day before.

He didn’t come home the day after, when Harry came in to give his testimony and stopped in the commission’s office afterward to tell Remus rather awkwardly that he didn’t blame him for anything.

“I don’t blame you for anything, either,” said Remus, and they shook hands, and Remus resisted asking if Harry had heard from Sirius, if Sirius was staying at his, if Sirius knew that Grimmauld Place was his own, not Remus’s, and Remus had cleared out of it.

The day after that, when Sirius still wasn’t in, Remus set a small charm on the front foyer that would float a leaf in the door frame between the foyer and the staircase if anybody came through it. He thanked Hannah and Tonks for putting him up and said that he would be going back to Grimmauld Place for the time being and please to let him know if they happened to hear from Sirius.

“All right,” said Hannah with her most bracing, tactful smile. Her hand was tucked through Tonks’s elbow. They looked comfortable and right together in a way that made Remus feel painfully extraneous.

“What, he’s not owled you?” said Tonks.

Hannah nudged her.

“Oh, right,” Tonks said. She looked as though she might say more, but Remus thanked her, said goodbye again, and Apparated out.

The day after that, he got to the office early and found Layla at her desk crying. She did not look up when he came in, or acknowledge his presence at all. Feeling quite without resource, he pulled his chair over to her desk and put an arm around her, gingerly. To his surprise, she leaned her head on his shoulder and went on crying. Eventually, she stopped, and said—less crisply than was usual for her, but not much less—that she ought to be getting on with her report on violence against half-blood and Muggle-born Ministry detainees.

When Remus Apparated back into Grimmauld Place that night, no leaf floated in the foyer’s door frame. He could not decide whether he should be worried. He was badly worried.

On the fifth day, Remus stopped keeping track, because the _Prophet_ got hold of Harry’s testimony.

“Well,” said Jack to the rest of them, bracingly, “it _was_ public record.”

The joke to be made was _Go back to work, Jack,_ but none of them made it. Trish was chewing on her lip, and Pomona had her hands pressed together so hard the knuckles were white. Because someone had to say something, Remus said, “We’ll send the post to the overflow office. I’ll go through it if none of the lower staff wants to. Is it being screened for curses?”

“I’ll ask,” said Layla.

They got back to work. There was nothing else to do. The _Prophet_ published pieces about the truth commission nearly every day after that. Jack discovered that Layla had never followed through with getting a protection detail, and his mask of unconcern—which had been so skillful that Remus had just about believed in it—slipped.

“You’d never tolerate this from one of us,” he said. “You’d tell us that our safety was the most important thing.”

Layla didn’t say anything, at first. Then: “I’ve nearly got all my notes together.”

“Your _notes?_ ” Now Jack was shouting, properly. “D’you think that’s all that matters, your bloody notes? I’m not talking about your work, I’m talking about you! Merlin’s beard, Layla! Ms. Amin, excuse me, well, I’m not having this. You’ll take the bloody protection detail or you’ll have me and Remus following you around everywhere like ghosts at the bloody feast.”

Layla glanced up at Remus, a question in her eyes.

“I’m afraid so,” said Remus, feeling rather dashing about it.

“As if you know any spells I don’t,” said Layla. Jack showed signs of beginning to shout again, so she waved her hands and said, “All right, all right, fine, yes, I will arrange for it.”

“Hell you will,” grumbled Jack. “Can’t be trusted. I’ll bloody arrange for it.”

The vitriol they were receiving was not exclusively directed at Layla, but a good deal of it was. Remus learned—and told Layla’s new bodyguard, Dotty, but not Layla herself—that several nasty curses had been screened out from the post, in envelopes addressed to Layla directly, that looked like perfectly harmless RSVPs for coming in to give statements. Amos Diggory came by the office once or twice, smug and threatening and trying to loom over Layla, and had to be shown off by Pomona, angrier than Remus had ever seen her.

“What would your mother say?” Pomona scolded. “What do you think _Cedric_ would think of what you’ve done? I’m ashamed of you! Coming here to intimidate a witch who, may I add, was not remotely the deciding vote to ask you _or_ Harry in!” 

Which succeeded in clearing him off the commission premises, but did not stop him writing a scathing editorial for the _Prophet_ about the work they were doing. It was a nastily effective piece of rhetoric.

 _Meanwhile,_ it said, _as this Slytherin-led Ministry commission pursues grudge cases against the greatest war hero since Albus Dumbledore—_

Harry stopped by the office with a copy of the editorial. “D’you see this?” he said to Remus. “Hi, Professor Sprout. Hi, Jack.”

Jack sketched a wave without looking up.

“Jack’s ghost-writing me a response,” said Harry, in response to a questioning look from Remus. “You know.”

“Oh,” said Remus.

Harry brushed the backs of his fingers across his scar, under his hair. “Er,” he said, “er, things’ve been, you know, fine, my end.”

“Have they?” Remus said, trying not to sound urgent. “Not—because—”

“No, well—” said Harry at the same time. They both ground awkwardly to a halt. Layla made an impatient noise from her corner, and Remus gestured for Harry to go on. “Some—there are—I’ve gotten letters at work, you know, saying I shouldn’t be an Auror if—and maybe I—anyway. But I want, you know, because I went back and looked at the transcript for the kid who said about it—”

“Lovely,” said Layla.

“Layla,” said Pomona.

Harry tilted his head back and swallowed very hard. Remus occupied himself arranging some of his papers into a tidier stack. Finally, Harry said, “Dunno. I want to say something about it. That it’s not right, and it shouldn’t’ve been right when we were at war, either.”

“We all did things,” said Remus. “Everyone in this room, let alone in the building, that we’d like to take back.” He put a hand on Harry’s shoulder and squeezed and let go.

Harry nodded. He was so young, and he looked so _fucking_ much like James.

* * *

_Dear Padfoot,_

_I hope this letter finds you. I’m worried. You don’t have to write back, but will you owl Tonks or Harry to say you’re all right, or send a letter to the commission offices, so I know you’re not dead in a bush somewhere?_

He took out _dead in a bush somewhere,_ which was what James and Peter used to say would be Remus’s fate if the other three didn’t come out on wolf night. Sirius had already made it clear that pleas to their shared history were unwelcome.

_so I know you’re all right._

That was _all right_ twice in two lines, but it didn’t matter.

_I won’t write again after this if you don’t write back. I don’t want to be a bother, or assume anything about what you want from me. Only if there is anything you want from me, I hope you’ll ask me so I can try to do it._

No. Much, much too needy. He took out the last sentence and stared at _what you want from me._ He wasn’t good at this, and Sirius never had been either. What Sirius had been good at, back then, was—not talking, but. Sifting out the things that mattered from the things that didn’t, he had been good at that, no matter how mad the things he decided didn’t matter were. Like Remus being a werewolf. Sirius was the one who had worked that out, of course.

“Oy, Remus,” he had said, bouncing on Remus’s bed the way he used to when they were young enough for it not to feel—for Remus not to feel— Anyway. “You’re a werewolf, yeah?”

Remus could feel in his ears the distinct _thud thud thud_ of his heart, when Sirius said those words in that way. As if the secret Remus had all his life been told he must keep at any cost weighed nothing at all.

“No,” he had whispered, tears pricking at his eyes.

And Sirius had said, wonderfully, “Well, whatever you want, then. Can I copy your Charms homework?”

_I’m looking for a flat now, and I’ll try to be out of Grimmauld Place before you get back. Or if you want me to go sooner, owl and say so and I’ll take a room at Tom’s straight away._

That was more like how he wanted to sound: matter-of-fact, working through logistics. Not much different than writing letters to coordinate appointments for the commission.

_When we were at school all I cared about was not losing you._

He tried to decide if it would be too much of a love letter if he didn’t add _and James and Peter. And James and Peter_ would have been true, but beside the point. Anyway, he could come back to it later if he decided differently.

_When I was a teacher at Hogwarts, I might have solved everything if I had gone to Dumbledore with what I knew._

No good. If he had gone to Dumbledore with what he knew, Sirius would have been caught and sent back to Azkaban. Sirius had only ever tried to get to Peter, that year; he hadn’t sent any sort of message to Remus at all. Remus wondered what he would have done. If one wolf night he had been huddled in the Shrieking Shack, waiting, and Sirius had walked through the door the way he used to, all interested brown eyes and unfastened school tie.

That didn’t bear thinking about. Anyway it would devolve very quickly into thinking about other things, how matters might have unfolded with the two of them alone together in the Shrieking Shack, and wanking to Sirius always ended with Remus feeling spent and miserable.

_When I was a teacher at Hogwarts, I betrayed Dumbledore’s trust and put all the children of the school in danger out of fear that he would hate me._

_Hate me_ made stupid tears prick at Remus’s eyes. He took it out.

_out of fear that it would change the way he looked at me. I thought I couldn’t bear that, losing the few people I cared about and who cared about me. I had lost you in the worst way possible. I lost James and Lily, and the person I believed Peter to be._

_If you’re reading this—if you aren’t too angry to hear what I have to say—I can imagine you rolling your eyes and telling me not to get into such a fuss. I know that what happened wasn’t my fault, not entirely, and if I had told Dumbledore what I knew, there’s every chance you’d have been caught and sent back to Azkaban._

Sent back to Azkaban, and kissed. When Remus had nightmares, he dreamed of kissing Sirius and drawing back to find that he, Remus, had been a dementor all along. Of realizing that he had been kissing an empty, lolling body, the person that he had loved gone from it forever. He took the sentence out.

_I know what happened wasn’t my fault._

Leaving it as stark as that made his breath come in unsteady rasps. He set down his quill, clenched his hand into a fist, opened it, and picked up the quill again.

_It wasn’t yours, either, Sirius. You’ve carried that far too long, and it isn’t my business but I hope you can put it down. You loved James and Lily and Harry as much as I did, more, and you would never have done anything to put them in danger. It’s Peter’s fault, and Voldemort’s, and nobody else’s. Believe that, if you don’t believe anything else I say or have said to you in all our lives._

At best Sirius would dismiss that; at worst he would laugh at Remus’s stupid, raw sincerity. Remus told himself he didn’t care. Defiantly, he took out _it isn’t my business but._

_What I mean is that the worst thing about me has always been the compromises I was willing to make to keep—_

You. To keep you. To keep you, you, you, you. And hadn’t there been—could he look back and say there had not been—some part of him that had wanted Sirius free, even knowing that he was Voldemort’s creature? Hadn’t the thought of sending Sirius, laughing boundless Sirius Black, back to the dementors made Remus’s stomach turn over? Hadn’t he thought the dementors guarding the castle were enough, and Dumbledore was enough, and the vigilance of the whole wizarding world was enough?

_to keep the good opinion of the few people willing to extend it to me._

There.

_And I found, sitting in those offices with a Muggle girl who lost her mother, and four people who risked their lives to see Voldemort finished, that I couldn’t let that be the guidepost for me anymore._

Put that way, it sounded like he had just been courting the good opinion of a different set of people. Maybe he had been. His head throbbed. It was wolf night in three days, and he wanted to be held. He wanted Sirius to hold him the way he had in the dungeons at the Ministry, tight and fierce and protective. He scratched the paragraph and tried again.

_And I don’t think, having this job, that I can go on letting that be my guidepost. It would be a betrayal of what I promised to do, what I’ve been trying to do, what everyone on that commission is trying to do. I can’t do that to them, and I can’t do it to myself._

He wanted to say more. He wanted to tell Sirius to go to the Ministry and pull the testimony of the Ravenclaw girl who had testified against Harry. He wanted to send one of the uglier letters they had received about her. That brave fucking child, witnessing horrors when she was eleven and she should have been home and her life should have been different and the world should have been different. She made Remus ashamed.

 _I hope you’ll understand. I hope you’ll come back,_ he wrote. _If you’re able to. You don’t know how much I hate being without you._

He sat and stared at the words he had written. Sirius had been back for seven years, and Remus thought—or maybe he was just being reckless, maybe he was throwing away a secret when he didn’t need to, maybe he would lose Sirius forever, maybe Sirius was already lost, maybe maybe maybe—that seven years was long enough.

 _Maybe I’ll sign it_ yours, he thought, and he laughed aloud at the idea. His laugh did not sound quite human, but he was not quite human, and anyway, Sirius already hated him.

He signed it _Remus_ and sent it.


	9. Chapter 9

**Excerpted from “An Act of Crime, in a Time of War,” by Harry Potter, _The Daily Prophet_ editorial, 15 October 2000**

There’s something I want to make very clear, in response to some of the correspondence I’ve received that casts doubt on the anonymous testimony of the Hogwarts student who drew attention to my use of an Unforgivable Curse against convicted Death Eater Amycus Carrow.

First of all, my trust in the work of the truth commission is absolute. The commission includes two of my former teachers, Pomona Sprout and Remus Lupin, who both risked their lives repeatedly to protect their students (including myself); it was assembled by Minister of Magic Kingsley Shacklebolt, a man of extraordinary personal integrity and an unflinching ally during our time as members of the Order of the Phoenix.

More importantly, I can confirm to the _Daily Prophet_ that the anonymous testimony received by the commission is accurate. While searching for a key item that would ensure Tom Riddle’s downfall before the Battle of Hogwarts, I performed the Cruciatus Curse on Amycus Carrow. I’m not sure how much the details matter, because the truth of it is this: I performed an Unforgivable Curse on another wizard.

My parents, who were killed by Tom Riddle and his Death Eaters, would have expected better of me. I expect better of myself. The wizarding world should expect better of me, too.

* * *

Wolf night that month was terrible.

Remus had known it would be. When he was off-kilter going into wolf night, the wolf knew. The wolf—he didn’t think the wolf wanted him to pay, exactly, but it wanted frantically to be outside of its own skin. Remus thought that must be it. He knew the feeling. He brought slabs of meat, because he could afford them now, and unwrapped them like a gift for his wolf-self. He brought water to boil and a small tin of tea, and made himself tea while he waited for the moon to rise.

None of it mattered. The wolf didn’t care. Remus woke the next morning at the far end of the tunnel that led out to the Whomping Willow, in so much pain that it nauseated him. He was too dizzy to stand, and he had to crawl back to the Shrieking Shack on hands and knees. It should have been humiliating, but he felt too ill to care. One of his wrists throbbed when he put weight on it. As he came into the relative light of the Shack, he inspected it and found that a long, fat bruise was forming from the base of his thumb to mid-forearm. Evidently the wolf had done its best to get past the Whomping Willow.

“Bloody wonderful,” he said aloud, his accent licking in at the edges of his voice. It didn’t matter. Nobody was there to hear.

If the wolf managed to escape, one night, ever—

He was so close to Hogwarts. That little Ravenclaw third-year, Sienna Davies, who had come in and been so brave and told the truth. Remus lied and lied and lied and lied, and had never stopped lying.

He thought of the letter he had sent to Sirius, and gagged. He wondered if the wolf had eaten the meat early enough for it to have been digested, or if he was going to be sick later on.

* * *

Harry’s editorial ran two days later, and the amount of angry owls the commission was receiving reduced slightly. Remus owled Harry to ask if things were all right his end, and Harry said yes, which might have meant _yes_ or might have meant _all the angry owls are coming to me now_ or might have meant _piss off Remus you fucking traitor,_ but there wasn’t much Remus could do with it no matter which it was.

(He also said, _Sirius read it & he says I sound like Mum,_ the first acknowledgement Remus had yet received that Sirius was still alive and able to send letters. But he wrote back to Harry, _She would be so proud of you,_ anyway, because it was true and he missed her.)

Wearily, he wrote out another letter to the two centaur groups that had been receptive to him. Then, for good measure, he wrote one to the centaurs at the Forbidden Forest, who by all reasonable standards ought to have been the first ones to agree to come in. They had fought Voldemort directly, after all, in that last battle.

“Writing the centaurs again,” he said to Layla.

He expected her to ignore him, but she said, “You’ve been tenacious.”

Remus looked up in surprise. “Sorry?”

“I said you’ve been tenacious,” said Layla. “Jack would have given up on them by now.”

“Oy,” Jack said mildly.

“Go back to work,” Remus and Layla both said.

Remus was still trying to work out if he had been given a compliment. Layla felt his eyes on her and turned around. “Stop gawping at me. Their testimony is important and valuable. That’s all I’m saying. For heaven’s sake.”

The following week (Sirius was still not back, and Remus, for reasons he did not want to spend too much time on, had still not moved out of Grimmauld Place or indeed done more than make half-hearted enquiries about other places to live), Jack shoved a roll of parchment at Remus and said, “There, if you like.”

Layla had gone out to get tea. Even if they had been able to justify, at this stage, sending the statement-takers out for tea and food—which they were not—they had all separately discovered that it helped to be away from the office at times. (The Healer had known this from the start, Remus thought.) Pomona was at Hogwarts, helping an overwhelmed McGonagall to send owls to new students.

“There if I like what?” said Remus.

“Well—if you wouldn’t mind reading it,” Jack said.

Remus swiveled his chair around to look at Jack properly. He was nervous, alternating scratching at his temple and spinning his quill around the fingers of his hand. “You all right?” he said.

“I know you’re busy,” said Jack, “so—yeah. It’s only a first, you know. Having a go at it.” His quill was a mess, all the feathers crushed.

“Not of the report?”

“Yeah?” said Jack, defensively. “It’s a first draft, I said. Of one bit of it. I didn’t want to show the girls if it wasn’t, you know. Basically all right.”

Remus felt affectionate towards Jack, suddenly. He himself was never sure if anything he did was any good, but Jack always seemed—certain of himself in a way that Remus associated with wealth and good looks. It was endearing to discover the cracks in the surface. “All right,” he said. “I’ll have a look in a bit.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m, I’ll just—” Jack leaned back and let the momentum of the lean spin him around to face the other way, then marched out of the office.

The segment Jack had been working on was based on Layla’s work primarily, since she had been the fastest to accomplish what she needed. (In part this was because she was efficient, and in part because she depended the least on witness statements and the most on Ministry records, to which Kingsley had given her full access.) It began with a story. A wizard two years out of Hogwarts, delighted to have secured a Ministry job, suddenly booted out of his position. His wand confiscated. His wife was hauled in, as well, and asked a series of frightening questions about how he had acquired the wand.

“It didn’t make any sense,” she had said in her statement—Remus remembered her. “I mean—the questions they asked, I couldn’t work out what they were driving at. I couldn’t defend him because I didn’t understand—I _would_ have. I would have.”

He looked up to tell Jack that he, too, remembered this statement and had been struck by that. But Jack had already gone out. It was the most artistic-temperament behavior Remus had ever seen him display. He wished he could tell Layla without being unkind.

Then Jack got into the numbers, which he’d pulled from Hannah’s coding spell. At the top of the scroll he had written very large “PROPER NUMBERS TO COME.” How many wands snapped. How many people had been sacked. How many years of work experience the Ministry had lost by it. “Who took their places?” Jack asked in a subheading, and the answer was that nobody had. The machine had been unsustainable; if Voldemort had not fallen, the edifice would have crumbled anyway.

It wasn’t cheerful reading, but Remus felt something that he had only ever felt once before, when Sirius and James and Peter had pounced on him in the bedroom, woken him up at two in the morning to tell him that they’d worked out how to become Animagi so they could be with him on wolf night. His teenage self had been terrified and miserable and ashamed. Beneath all of that, though, he had been conscious of a basic certainty that things were going to be all right.

Or—well. _All right_ wasn’t it. He had been so frightened, and so grateful to his friends, that it had been hard to wrap his mind around any sort of idea of all-right-ness. But the last wolf night before that, he had forgotten to eat during the day, and he didn’t have raw meat to eat back then, and he had felt so poorly when he woke up the next morning that he hadn’t come in to school. He had lain on the floor of the Shrieking Shack, wide awake and hurting and exhausted, and stared at the wall for hours. _This is it,_ he remembered thinking. _This is all there is._

And then—and then there had been _more,_ whole vistas of more, there had been Sirius transforming into a dog and jumping up to lick his face, and Peter disappearing into the bedclothes as a rat, and James blushing and making jokes about the damage he had done to their room trying to transform inside and assuring Remus that it was best for everyone if he didn’t show off at that exact moment. And Sirius transforming back into a human only to say _First time he’s ever not wanted to show off at any exact moment,_ and James shoving him and Sirius shoving back, and Peter—human again—touching Remus’s elbow and asking if he was all right because Remus was struggling not to cry.

Sirius had stopped wrestling James and said, _You’ve gone all moony, Moony,_ and that had been that. Not exactly all right, but Remus felt as if a new path were unfolding before him that did not end with letting the Whomping Willow bash him to pieces because there wasn’t much of anything worth bothering about.

He felt that way now, reading Jack’s report. He felt that the wizarding world might be able to survive this, though he hadn’t been aware of believing that it might not.

“It’s good,” he said aloud. “It’s really good,” and he shoved his chair back and went looking for Jack, to tell him.

* * *

That Saturday—a day off that Pomona had insisted they all take, though Layla had been coming in on weekends all along and Remus had started following her example—Remus went to the Leaky Cauldron and inquired about the price of a room for a month. Since it was the quiet season for Tom, a lull in guests until the new students and their families started showing up, the price was reasonable, and Remus went to Gringotts and withdrew the gold for it straight away.

“If you hear of anyone looking to rent a place,” he said as he was paying Tom, “give me a shout. London would be best, I hate commuting.”

“I’ll keep an ear to the ground,” promised Tom.

Remus went back to Grimmauld Place and packed a bag. He felt miserable about it, but not unmanageably so. The kind of miserable you survived. The kind that had worse days and better days, and as time went on it was fewer of the former and more of the latter. Not the kind that killed you and the few people who came to your funeral said _tsk tsk_ and _Well we all expected this._

On Sunday he went into the office and stayed there until his eyes wouldn’t stay in focus. He Apparated to his room at the Leaky Cauldron to sleep, and when he looked in the mirror, his eyes were as bloodshot as if he had been crying. This seemed, for some reason, very funny.

On Monday he had dinner with Tonks. Their Monday dinners had not been quite so reliable since Remus began working for the truth commission and Tonks admitted she was serious about Hannah; but Tonks had insisted on this one. “I’m bringing Hannah,” she had said.

“I assumed,” said Remus.

“Hannah says don’t assume,” said Tonks. She had had a look on her face that was mostly pride, and a touch of annoyance, and it made Remus feel complicated about his own life.

At dinner, Hannah said, “Well, she shouldn’t assume. People who stop going out with their own friends because they’ve started dating someone new are the worst people on earth.”

Tonks giggled. Remus said, “That’s a bold stance from an employee of a commission investigating human rights violations.” The phrase, _human rights violations,_ was one that he had written and seen written but that did not yet feel comfortable in his mouth. But it was what they were doing. It was why any of this mattered.

“Well,” agreed Hannah.

Tonks was looking at her sideways and expectant. When Hannah did not go on, she said, “Tell him.”

“Me?” said Hannah. “You’re the one—”

“No, I can’t, it feels—” Tonks put a hand to her mouth to cover up a smile that was slightly tremulous. “It’s—no, you tell.”

With a smile that matched Tonks’s for nerves and excitement and sheer joy, Hannah said, “Right, well—I’ve just gotten word this week that the—your Ministry, or whoever decides—they’ve said I can stay on. Officially.”

Somehow, Remus could not parse the news. He looked at Tonks uncertainly. She was wiping tears off her cheeks impatiently. “Stay on as—?”

“Not exactly my person,” said Tonks, “but—”

“But _also_ as your person,” said Hannah. Her eyes were bright.

“That’s—” It was because the news was good. Everything had been so bloody terrible for so long. Remus felt like an actor who had forgotten all his lines and was awaiting a cue from the wings. “But that’s—that’s brilliant, you—that’s _everything,_ they’ve actually said she can—”

Tonks threw up her hands, breathless with happiness.

“We couldn’t have—” Hannah laughed, not because anything was funny. “If you hadn’t let me come on, and, and been—”

“Been _brilliant,_ ” said Tonks.

“Stop it,” Remus said. “Hannah’s the brilliant one, every word Layla said to the Minister was true, you—” He stumbled out of his chair and tugged Tonks up to hug her. Her tears soaked into the wool of his robe. She deserved this, something, this, and Hannah deserved it, they were good and they made each other happy and they deserved to be made happy. He hugged Hannah, too, although he was not sure they knew each other quite well enough for embraces, but he wanted her to know, them to know, that he was purely and simply and uncomplicatedly glad for them and nothing else.

The days had gotten so summer-long that there were hours of daylight left after dinner was finished, and Remus decided to walk home. He was fond of London, the unmagical bits that had let him have a life after—

And he was thinking of London, and of Lily and James in a way that almost didn’t hurt, and not paying attention, which explained how he found himself not at the Leaky Cauldron waiting for a lull in foot traffic so that he could slip in unnoticed, but at the door of Grimmauld Place, his hand on the doorknob.

He went in.

 _I’ll just check that I haven’t left anything important here,_ he thought, _and then go,_ but he found himself drifting toward the kitchen. He pulled out the chair that Sirius had always sat in when they ate dinner together, and slid his fingers carefully over the back of it, as if he were checking for dust.

“All right, Moony?”

Remus turned around so fast that his legs tangled up with the legs of the chair he’d pulled out, and God, there was Sirius, leaning up against the door jamb the way he used to, his hair in a messy ponytail, _shaved,_ nearly but not quite smiling.

“You’re back,” Remus said stupidly.

“Got what I went for.”

“I thought—” Everything that Remus had thought (feared) seemed to come rushing in on him like an avalanche. He could not breathe under the weight of it. “I didn’t think you were coming back.”

The hint of a smile that had been playing around Sirius’s mouth vanished. “It’s my house.”

“No, I know. It was silly, I suppose it was silly. Where did you go?”

“Belgium,” said Sirius.

“Oh.”

They stared at each other. Remus thought stupidly that if eyes were lungs then Sirius would be air and Remus would be gasping. Finally he said, “D’you—did you get my—” He remembered the things he had not taken out of the letter, and found he couldn’t finish the question.

“Yeah,” said Sirius, still watching him intently.

“Doesn’t matter, anyway.”

“Does it not?” Sirius said.

Remus met his eyes with some difficulty. “I didn’t know if you’d come back.”

“Well.” Sirius huffed a laugh and looked away. “Makes two of us.” Remus must have looked bewildered, because Sirius waved a vague hand in back of him, indicating the rest of the house. “Your—things aren’t here.”

 _Things_ sounded so posh, for some reason, that Remus felt his face grow hot. “I told you,” he said, though he couldn’t remember if this was true. “I took a room at the Cauldron.”

Sirius’s mouth opened, and shut again.

“I wasn’t sure—” Remus began, but Sirius interrupted.

“Could’ve slept on that couch you got me. In the—” He gestured vaguely, his hands describing a small enclosed space.

Remus flinched. “You burned it,” he said.

“I didn’t burn it,” protested Sirius, sounding more like his proper self than he had so far—aggrieved and told-off. Remus smiled, because he couldn’t help it. “I moved it. Don’t be stupid, Moony, I wasn’t going to burn such a lovely illegal spell just cause you’d stored it somewhere daft. It’s in a bag in my room. You could’ve slept there if you didn’t want to be in the house.”

“I think technically it would still have been in the—”

Sirius came close to smiling. “Ah, fuck off.” He looked down at his shoes, which were as scuffed and bootlace-tangled as ever. “Got you something.”

“Sorry?” Remus said, assuming he had misheard.

“I _got_ you something.” Sirius ducked out of the room—Remus had to stop himself from calling after him—and came back with his arms full of wooden crate, which he hauled onto the kitchen table with a decided thump.

“What’s this?”

“Open it.”

Expecting a prank, Remus undid the latch gingerly and flipped back the hinged lid. In the crate were twelve large, stoppered bottles. Unlabeled. He looked up at Sirius, who was close to smiling again, a hovering sort of look. “Er,” he said.

“It’s Wolfsbane,” said Sirius, and the smile broke through, uncontainable.

Remus wasn’t aware of moving. Of anything. But his hands were closed into fists around the soft cotton of Sirius’s shirt, and Sirius’s back bumped lightly against the kitchen wall. “I,” said Remus. “I.” His voice did not sound like him. It echoed strangely, as if it were coming from somewhere else.

“D’you like it?”

“I. It’s. You.” _Do better than this,_ he told himself. He couldn’t do better; he didn’t have better. Remus was aware that he was making this moment disastrous, but he couldn’t seem to get his brain moving any faster. There was no Wolfsbane potion in all of Great Britain.

“Remus?” Sirius said quietly. His hands had come up to grip Remus’s upper arms, hard enough that Remus had a separate awareness of each of his ten fingers. Everything was too much, and Sirius smelled like fresh-cut grass. “You all right, mate?”

Yes. No. “You went to Belgium,” Remus whispered, more or less into Sirius’s collarbone. His head was canted down so that he wouldn’t accidentally meet Sirius’s eyes.

Slow enough that Remus could have stopped it, if he’d wished, Sirius’s hands slid up his arms and back, pulling him into a loose hug. Remus’s fists were still trapped between their bodies. “Well, all right, don’t have kittens about it, it wasn’t the moon I went to.”

“I didn’t think,” said Remus. “I didn’t think you. Were. Would.”

Sirius kept trying to tilt his head at an angle that would make Remus look up at him. After a few unsuccessful tries, he gave up and tightened his arms, pressed his cheek, oh God, against Remus’s hair. If Remus pulled back, he would have to look at Sirius’s face, and he would have to explain himself and tuck his feelings about Sirius away and he _couldn’t,_ the shabby old kitchen table swayed with the weight of the wooden crate and he _couldn’t,_ so he burrowed closer, nuzzled into Sirius’s neck.

It might as well have been the moon. It might as fucking well.

“Thank you,” Remus whispered.

Remus could not have described what changed. Sirius didn’t tighten his arms or loosen them or move his head, but the way he held Remus was, abruptly, different. Before Sirius had been sure, and now he wasn’t. A small, miserable noise escaped Remus at the thought of it. At once, Sirius let go of him.

“All right?” he said. His eyes were rimmed red (why?). “Sorry, look, I didn’t mean to—”

Remus touched two fingers to Sirius’s lower lip, and Sirius stopped talking. His eyes were very wide, darker than usual. He hardly breathed. Remus could not draw his eyes away from Sirius’s mouth. The curve of his lip, the soft warmth of his breath against Remus’s fingers.

Remus kissed him. Their lips fit together exactly the way he had imagined. Remembered. Sirius swallowed audibly and drew back; the slide away of his bottom lip was warm and good. His expression was nothing Remus could read, Azkaban-dark eyes unfathomable.

“Don’t go to Scotland,” Sirius said with quiet urgency.

Remus laughed. “Why would I go to Scotland?”

“Fuck if I know,” said Sirius, and dragged Remus back in. It wasn’t the same as when they were young. It wasn’t the impulsive, hungry thing of surprise and tangled-up limbs that it had been on Sirius’s grotty old sofa all those years ago. Two decades on, Sirius kissed like it was the only chance he would ever get.

Oh, it was good, kissing Sirius, much much better than Remus had remembered, or else one of them had gotten better at it in the years between. Sirius put a hand to Remus’s hair and dug his fingers in, licking into Remus’s mouth when Remus moaned. His mouth tasted, God, he tasted like mint and he tasted like cigarettes, and Remus discovered that if he pushed a little, Sirius would go where Remus put him.

Sirius’s free hand slid into the back of Remus’s shirt, and he made an embarrassing, desperate, ragged noise at the feel of Sirius’s fingers on his skin. He let go Sirius’s mouth long enough to say, “ _Don’t,_ please, I—”

“I forgot,” said Sirius, nonsensically, kissing down the line of his jaw between words, “I forgot, I forgot, don’t go, fuck, God, oh please, don’t go to Scotland—”

Forgot what and why Scotland; but Sirius had one leg between Remus’s, which reminded him that there were things besides mouths and hands in the world and he wanted to give every one of them to Sirius Black. “Can we,” said Remus, “Sirius, God, can we go, go upstairs—”

Oh God, his smile. Remus found himself trembling, holding Sirius’s face between his hands as if he could keep the smile preserved. He was sure Sirius was going to say something arch—that was what always happened, when the mood threatened to turn serious—but instead, Sirius turned his face into one of Remus’s hands, and shut his eyes. He looked younger with his eyes closed. Remus kissed his cheekbone.

“You mean to be ravished?” Sirius said, glancing at Remus through his eyelashes.

Yes. Yes.

Yes.

* * *

“Do you need to get up?”

Sirius smiled at him radiantly, as if he’d handed him something precious.

“What?” said Remus, self-conscious.

“D’you need to get oop,” he said, imitating the soft vowels. Remus groaned and tilted his head backward. “Don’t make that noise! You sound all—rumpled and, and lovely.”

“I don’t say oop.”

Sirius ground his chin fondly into Remus’s shoulder. “Don’t be like that. You do sometimes, it’s brilliant. I love you the best when you stop trying to pretend you aren’t really you.”

 _Love you the best_ drowned out everything else. Remus found his breath coming harder than it should. It should have been fantastic, the realization of what he had always wanted, but his chest was twisting up in what that felt like panic. He said, again, “I don’t say oop.”

“All right, you don’t. Stop wriggling. Is it because I said I love you, or are you bothered that I know you’re from Shropshire?”

“God.” Remus struggled himself seated, even though it was cold in the room, without the blankets and Sirius’s skin. “You—you— It’s like lying next to a, a fucking, a bloody Erumpent. You can’t just go and, you can’t just say—”

“Both, then,” Sirius said, judiciously. “Fine, fine, I don’t love you and you’re not from Shropshire. Will you come back now?”

 _If you love me,_ thought Remus, _how can you be so calm?_ Love wasn’t like that for him, easy words in a warm bed. It was desperate and grasping; it was knowing you’d give up anything to keep it.

Sirius huffed and scooted closer, tucking his head into the hollow at Remus’s hipbone. It was uncomfortable; Remus needed the loo. “Pet my hair,” Sirius ordered.

Remus settled a hand absently against the back of Sirius’s head, and rubbed with his fingers, into the bone of his skull. Sirius gave a contented sigh.

“Anyway, I know you love me too, so I’m not fussed,” said Sirius, as if Remus had denied it. “That feels good, don’t get distracted, keep on. You always think people will go once you’ve done anything they didn’t expect. It’s shite, and I already know everything anyway. I know what your accent sounds like when you’re sleepy and I know you’ve got chocolate stashed everywhere and I know the reason you never take off your shirt is that you think the scar’s ugly and I know you nearly got sorted into Ravenclaw but you’d rather be a fraud for being a coward than a fraud for being a fool, even though you aren’t either one and you never could be. I said keep on, Moony.”

His eyes were burning, but he kept on. Sirius’s hair was soft, and Sirius was conducting a grubby-fingered excavation into the deepest, ugliest recesses of Remus’s heart, and he couldn’t fucking bear it, but he kept on.

“It isn’t a trick.” Sirius’s voice was softer. He rolled on his back to look up at Remus, so that Remus had to stroke the side of his head instead of the back, rub a thumb and forefinger around the curve of Sirius’s ear.

(It felt like a trick, being able to touch him this way.)

A drop of water plinked onto Sirius’s cheek, which shut him up. They stayed that way for a little while, Sirius nuzzling his cheek against Remus’s stomach, Remus’s fingers in Sirius’s hair as if he were his dog-self now.

“I missed you,” said Remus. “I wished—”

He wished they had done this before. He wondered if there would be a next time and if there were a next time he wondered if he would be hungry enough for Sirius’s touch to take off his shirt. He shivered, thinking of it.

“Hm,” said Sirius, very satisfied. “Much more like it. Much more the reaction I would expect to receiving protestations of undying love.”

Remus glanced down, and blushed.

As it turned out, Sirius liked tremendously to make him blush.

* * *

“Why Scotland?” Remus remembered to ask, some time later.

“Yes, why indeed Scotland,” agreed Sirius, as if it were a joke they both shared.

Remus elbowed him.

“What’s that for?”

“You kept saying don’t go to Scotland, why Scotland? I hate Scotland, you know that.”

“I do know that,” Sirius said, “which is why it was quite damaging to my fragile ego when you trotted straight out the door and off to Scotland the moment I got up the courage to kiss you.” His voice was light, effortfully so.

“I didn’t—”

“Remus.” Sirius rolled over onto his stomach so that he could glare down. “Don’t try and wriggle out of it. I kissed you, and the next I heard about it, you were in Scotland. Not so much as a ‘thanks for the snog Padfoot’.”

Remus cast his mind back. He was sure that wasn’t right. When Dumbledore told him about the Scotland trip, he was—relieved, yes, but not because of _Sirius._ “I don’t think it was that soon after—”

“It was.”

“—and anyway Dumbledore was the one who—Sirius, it was not. It can’t have been, because I didn’t see you after Scotland. I came _back_ from Scotland when—”

He stopped. Sirius’s eyes had a hard, faraway look to them.

“I came back for the funeral,” Remus said. Insulting not to finish the sentence. A vicious pretense.

“As last memories go, though, eh?” said Sirius.

 _Last_ caught him like a punch to the gut. “It wasn’t that soon after,” he said again, weakly.

“It was, darling. We kissed on the seventh. You went to Scotland on the eighth. Don’t make that face.” He tapped his forefinger on the place between Remus’s eyebrows.

_Darling._

“I didn’t go to Scotland because I—Dumbledore sent me. They thought I was the spy. Sirius, I—”

“Don’t.” Sirius lowered himself back down, snuggling his head against Remus’s shoulder. “It’s all right. It was a—a good memory. A nice thing to—”

He didn’t finish, because it would have been a lie. Dementors sucked all the good memories out of you. When Sirius remembered it in Azkaban, he wouldn’t have thought about the warmth and the happiness of it; he’d have remembered that Remus left him. Twelve years, he’d have remembered it like that.

“I’m sorry.” Remus wrapped his arms around Sirius as if he could protect him from long-ago dementors. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. If I’d known you gave a damn, I—” Warmth, against his skin. “Oh, God, are you crying?”

“No,” said Sirius, and belied it at once with an enormous sniff. “I love you, that’s all.”

 _I love you too._ Remus couldn’t sort out why he was finding it so hard to say. Of course he loved Sirius. It was foundational to him to love Sirius, it was very nearly the cornerstone of what made him (loving Sirius, and being a werewolf). He had loved Sirius before he understood what love was, and still he couldn’t get the words out.

Instead, he said, “If I had known that you—I thought it was only that you were— I thought it was only because you had come back from the mission, and you were—” He found there was no way of putting words to what he had thought without insulting Sirius. “If I’d known it mattered to you, I wouldn’t have gone.”

“Dumbledore sent you,” Sirius reminded him.

Remus tightened his arms. “I wouldn’t have gone,” he said again, and meant _I love you._

* * *

Very late that night, Remus woke up and removed himself cautiously from the bed. He used the loo downstairs so that he wouldn’t wake Sirius. As he washed his hands, he looked in the mirror at himself, to see if anything had changed. If it had, he was not able to detect it. He wondered if other people would be able to tell. He found the whole thing so implausible that he had to bite back a wave of panic.

Tiptoeing was futile on stairs as creaky as the ones in the Black house, and Remus knew that Sirius was awake even before he reached the door of his—of their—of his bedroom. He leaned against the doorframe and tried to make out Sirius’s form, careless pale limbs half-underneath blankets.

“Oi,” Sirius said, sounding very awake indeed. “What are you waiting for? Come in.”

Remus did.


End file.
